


pierce the moon, pull it from the heavens

by erzi



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Eventual Happy Ending, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Blue Lions Route Spoilers, M/M, doubt this is long enough to qualify as slow burn so let's call this Steady Simmer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-03
Updated: 2019-09-12
Packaged: 2020-10-05 23:42:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 32,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20497301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/erzi/pseuds/erzi
Summary: "Do you want me to find you a girl?" Sylvain asks, calm as the Saints, with none of their sacred intent.So he's asked it. He doesn't particularly want an answer.He doesn't get one. Felix whips his hands free and brusquely pushes past Sylvain, leaving him in Felix's own room with the mockery of winter's daylight unfeeling on his skin.





	1. pierce

**Author's Note:**

> inspired by [this](https://twitter.com/Bloodwrit/status/1160395024141443072) tweet

The girl clinging to Sylvain's arm bats her lashes and twirls her hair around a finger, but he has forgotten her name. She giggles at what he says, even the unfunny things, just looking at him with half-lidded eyes, tracing aimless patterns where her hand curls on his forearm.

_Ah_, Sylvain thinks, flatly. _She actually wants me_.

He'd asked her out because she was pretty. He'd seen her across the dining hall and offered her his usual grin, so worn on him his cheeks felt thinned out, but it had caught her. As that grin tended to. He'd finished his food, walked over to her, asked the question he could recite asleep, and gotten the answer he always got. He'd shot a thumbs up and wink at the Blue Lions' table as if any of his peers minded him when he ventured off in his impulses.

But there had been someone watching. Felix, who flitted his eyes away, mouth set in a tight line, fork stabbing through his steak to the very top of its tines. Of course he'd do that – of Sylvain's classmates, Felix despised his skirt chasing the most. 

Sylvain had ignored him and gone on with his dinner date. He had known how it would go: they'd flirt, have good food, maybe get in a few kisses, they'd part for the blessedly early night, and come morning he'd find someone else. These dates were never serious. Dalliances, Felix called them once. A bit of innocent fun, mindless and brief.

This girl is holding on to his arm like she doesn't intend to let him go for the night. Discreetly, he tries to go his own way; she tugs him back.

"My room isn't that way," she says. Pink dusts her cheeks, and it isn't from embarrassment nor from the cold. She wants what Sylvain is infamous in giving. He's bedded girls before, to be sure. But none of them have been this forthright about wanting it – it has always been him in the lead, he with the meaningless words they swallowed like honey. They were girls content with that single night or else too shy to seek him out again.

There is danger with this girl. If he allows this farce to continue, he will only tangle himself into where there is no escape.

"Or," the girl – what was her name? – murmurs, "were we going to your room?"

His usual charm will not help him here. It will only reinforce her belief he means any of this. Neither can he speak the truth; she would tell her friends, who'd tell _their_ friends, on and on until no girls heeded him anymore.

Something flies past his cheek and hits the wooden beam to his right with a hearty _thwack_. He eyes what is a dagger, in the last of its quivers, buried deep into the wood. And when Sylvain turns his eyes to the front, it is a shape in the lithe form of a certain swordsman who approaches, the flickering torchlight he passes on the walls adding harsher shadows to the twist on his face.

"Just _what___"–Felix growls when he is close enough Sylvain can see the furious glimmer in his eyes–"do you think you're _doing_"–he has reached them now, and he sweeps past Sylvain to grip the dagger dug onto the beam, pulling it free to point it between Sylvain's eyes–"in front of my _room_?"

Sylvain has gone cross-eyed from staring at the blade, and though Felix is threatening him, he laughs. "Felix!" A happy puff of breath steams out of him. Here is his way out. "Sorry, I didn't know where I was. The halls are kind of dark at this hour."

Felix quietly sheaths his dagger, but his glare sharpens. "That is what the torches are for."

"You can't deny the dorms all look the same!"

Felix harrumphs. With frigid slowness he acknowledges the girl at Sylvain's side. "I don't recognize you. Your dorm isn't in this area, is it? Leave."

Her jaw drops. She looks to Sylvain for support. "Are you going to let him speak to me like that?"

In her shock, her hold loosens, and Sylvain disentangles himself, crossing his arms behind his head. He glances to the thin blade-made notch on the wood beam. "He could have said it nicer, but... it _is_ late. You don't want to get in trouble."

Her eyebrows go up, her mouth curved to disbelief. She regains her composure, and with an insult calmly leveled at them both, she is off.

Sylvain breathes out. He grins. "Thanks for–"

Felix has drawn the dagger again, angling it to Sylvain's mouth. "No."

"'No'?! You don't even know what I was saying!"

"I can guess what it was. I didn't help you; I genuinely do not want you loitering near my room. You leave, too."

He clasps his hands together as if in prayer and laces his voice with all the sugar Felix hates. "Can't I stay the night? What if she's hiding somewhere waiting to see me go to my room, and then she kills me?"

"Reap what you have sown, Sylvain." He goes into his room, the heavy door closing with a loud finality in this quiet hall.

Sylvain thumps the door. "Felix, come on!"

No reply. It could be that the door is too thick to let his words through. Likelier than not, Felix is ignoring him.

"_Felix_," he whines.

Nothing.

"We said we'd die the same day, remember? If she kills me, my ghost is coming after you. I don't know about you but I don't want to die yet. Also, I don't want to kill you."

The door creaks open, but Sylvain's smile flattens when he sees what peeks through the gap is the dagger, glinting in the torchlight. "Leave," comes Felix's muffled voice.

"Why are you being like this?" Sylvain asks. "I mean, you're always like this, but you're really exaggerating how much I annoy you. And for something so minor!"

"This is no exaggeration."

"You actually want to stab me?"

"Yes. With someone as thick-headed as you, you'd unfortunately survive."

A laugh sputters out of Sylvain. He presses a finger to the underside of the blade, carefully, as to not draw blood. Felix falters; the dagger slightly slinks back. Sylvain quirks a smile and slides down the door with a tired sigh. "I'm going to sleep out here," he says, "and when the guards make their rounds, seeing me frozen to death outside your dorm, I'm sure you can answer their questions very innocently–"

The door swings open inwards so suddenly Sylvain falls on his back, the stone floor pebbling his skin. Felix, upside down, is glaring down at him. "You'll leave at first light."

Sylvain sits up, world turned right, and springs to his feet. "I will!" he says, springing for the bed. He lands face-first, legs dangling.

Felix immediately kicks him. "I think not. Sleep on the chair or the floor."

Sylvain flips himself, smile easy. "Yeah, I thought so. Worth a try." With a grunt, he gets up and seats himself on the study chair, its unfurnished wood frame uncomfortable. Sylvain rather brazenly crosses his legs and reclines on it, curiously eyeing Felix as he puts away his weapons. "Why were you being so aggressive?"

"Why were you being so idiotic?"

"I didn't think she seriously wanted to sleep with me."

Felix has stilled.

"Your turn," Sylvain says after a moment, leaning forward to place his feet flat to the floor.

Felix looks askance at him. He stands where the glow of the study table's glass lamp is weak. Where Sylvain is burning in its brightness, Felix's face is carved in shadow. "I'm going to change. Turn around."

"That doesn't answer my–"

"Turn. Around."

Sylvain smiles. "Are you serious? We grew up together– whoa, alright, put the dagger down, I get it! I'm turning around." The chair scrapes on the floor as he shifts it in a semi-circle. "There, I'm staring at the wall."

He can hear the whisper of Felix's clothes being slid off, but in these confines, they might as well be screams. And Felix's silently undressing presence behind him, unseen as it is, tries to slither into Sylvain's mind.

So Sylvain keeps talking, unblinkingly staring at the stones on the wall. "Really, why are you angry with me? I'm no stranger to dates. I didn't mean to end up at your room, either, I promise. But you were a help, so I'm glad I did. End up here, that is. Even if I have to sleep on your chair. Are you still not going to tell me why you got annoyed? It's never my intent to annoy you."

"It _is _your intent," Felix finally replies, "because your annoyance is related to your very existence. You can turn around."

"Ouch, Felix," Sylvain says, putting a hand to his heart as he turns. Felix is already in bed, blankets pulled up to his ears, and he is facing away from him. Not exactly an invite to conversation. But Felix's standoffish behavior has never been something to stop Sylvain. "Tell me the specifics for this grievance, at least? I need to know so I won't do it again."

"You exist. I suggest you die."

"Ack!" He keels over dramatically on the chair, clutching his heart. "With your words, I truly am dead now."

"Good. Be like a corpse and shut up; I'm trying to sleep."

Sylvain sighs, moving to rest crossed arms on the table. He puts his cheek against them, looking at the lump Felix makes on the bed. "You're so stubborn. Just tell me straight."

Felix doesn't move. It doesn't even seem he is breathing.

"Is it embarrassing?" Sylvain guesses, and in the resounding silence, considers what could possibly embarrass Felix that he wouldn't act up but keep mum. A thought does come, and with it wrenching guilt. "Felix, did you like her?"

Felix sits up so fast it's Sylvain who is dizzy. "_What_?"

"I would never mess around with a girl you liked, I swear to you. But you never told me and I didn't know–"

"I don't like her!" he snaps, and in the low lamplight Sylvain has yet to extinguish he sees Felix has let his hair down, and that it frames the sharp angles of his face as if it is a work of art. "I didn't even know her!"

"Was it another girl I went out with?"

"No! Quit fouling the air with your nonsense, shut off the light, and let me sleep!" He flips on his side, hair and blankets swishing.

Sylvain gapes. Speaks with the caution that tenses in his stomach while in battle. "Was it a guy?"

"_Sylvain_!"

"Fine, fine, I'm sleeping!" Hastily, he squeaks the light off. The room is plunged into darkness of varying greatness – Sylvain can discern the furniture, and Felix's shape – but none as dark as the black behind his closed lids creeping its way to his chest. He rests his arms on the table and lays his head down. Felix hadn't refuted his question. _I haven't flirted with a guy in a while_, he thinks. He can't remember who it could have been, this someone Felix cared about that he'd used so shallowly.

The guilt in him condenses, obstructing his breathing, disallowing him sleep.

He darts out of the room when the winter sunrise's pale fingers alight the bottom of the window. He had seen them born of the night himself.

He doesn't bring his question up again.

* * *

He doesn't bring his question up again, but it doesn't mean it does not plague him.

In the library, with its stifling silence, it whispers itself to hoarseness in his mind. He fights it off by fidgeting: bouncing his leg, absentmindedly tickling his cheek with the feathered end of his quill, drumming his fingers on his thigh. Felix sits in front of him, and Sylvain's lack of concentration does not enter his periphery. He is fully engrossed in his reading, eyes flitting left and right with impressive speed, but not as impressive as his notes scrawled without a glance.

Slowly, Sylvain stretches his legs out.

Felix makes no indication he's noticed.

Sylvain slides down his seat, legs reaching further in front, one of his feet nudging Felix's. That gets him a confused look, like Felix isn't sure he'd imagined a touch or if he'd accidentally hit a chair. But the look is brief, and he misses Sylvain's guilty smile. Pouting, Sylvain stretches even further, putting his legs directly into Felix's space, bumping him twice with his foot so there is no mistake this is him.

"So it _was_ you," Felix says, quietly, eyes still on his book, but unmoving.

"It was me," Sylvain says, smile widening. "What are you reading? You're very into it."

Felix spins the book around, keeping a finger at the current page as he flips to the cover. Gilded in thin gold letters is a needlessly verbose title Sylvain doesn't bother finishing reading. Combat arts or the like.

He exaggerates a yawn, which Felix ignores, returning to his studying. He rests his feet on Felix's lap, and Felix shoots up so violently he slams his knees – and thus Sylvain's feet – under the table before scooting away, the chair harsh on the floor. Glares and shushes are thrown their way.

"Break time?" Sylvain suggests, innocently.

Felix huffs, getting up and leaving. It isn't an agreement, but neither is it refusal, so Sylvain follows.

"Let's go get food," Sylvain says. "You have to replenish all that energy you put into studying. You were going at it aggressively."

"Better that than acting the fool, as you were."

He throws his hands up in placation. "I was complimenting you! I wish I was into anything that much."

"Really."

"Yes." He pauses. "Alright, one tiny thing: you should lighten up, too! Spending too much time squinting at books or juggling problems in your head is bad. Food's what we need to relax. Come on." He grabs Felix's wrist, changing directions toward the dining hall, not wherever it was Felix had been going that Sylvain hadn't questioned.

Felix protests, but his attempts at wriggling free of Sylvain's hold are useless; Sylvain is stronger and taller, humming as he half-drags him to the dining hall. Here, Felix's complaints and Sylvain's laugh blend into the happy chatter and cutlery clatter. Sylvain finds them seats and gets their food for them, fortuitously a beef stew fragrant with spices. He slides Felix's bowl over and his complaining ceases.

"See?" Sylvain says, spinning his spoon in his hand with a grin. "It was a good idea to get out for a bit."

"If a dish I didn't like was being served, would you have said the same?"

"After flattering the staff into making something for you, yeah."

Felix scoffs. "You have no shame," he says, but he eats his stew quite contentedly.

Manners forgotten, Sylvain puts his elbow on the table, his cheek on his palm. "It's part of what makes me so charming. I could give you lessons on how to be more approachable so you can be like me."

"I would rather have my eyes gouged out."

"But it's important! Especially with the ball coming up."

Felix's spoon stills halfway to his mouth.

"Did you forget about the ball?" Sylvain asks.

He swallows the spoonful of stew in one go, glowering. "Yes, because I don't care about it."

"_Felix_!"

"What?"

"It's the one big social event of the year, and you don't care about it?"

"Correct."

Sylvain leans forward, whispering behind a hand, "Is it because you have no one to go with?"

Felix's spoon drops thickly into the stew, a few drops splattering.

"Tell me who you want to go with," he continues. "I can convince them to go with you." _And__ tell me who it is I've wronged you with_.

"Is this an attempt at apologizing for the other day? Because if so, it's pitiable."

Sylvain blinks. Was he so see-through? "Felix–"

"If you keep talking," Felix says, with so much poison in his voice it might have been in his food, "I'm throwing this stew at your face."

He draws his bottom lip in, his question barely reined in. And then he can't anymore. "Could you at least tell me who it is you like? I don't want to–"

Felix storms off, dish unfinished.

"–mess up again." He sighs, slinking down to the table. _Why won't he trust me?_

For the sake of their friendship – and his own curiosity – Sylvain needs to know who it is. But with this newborn tension, strange even for Felix, his repeated prodding at it will make Felix's lashings harsher. Sylvain will wait for him to simmer down before bringing up the ball again. Or, more importantly, a semblance to his burning question.

This much he can do for him. 

* * *

"I'm– not– attending– the ball," Felix grits out, in between hacks at a straw enemy. Bits of straw flutter about them before settling on the ground in messy mounds.

"You have to!" Sylvain says, swiping away what remains of the straw man, forcing Felix to look at him. It's a glare, but it's something.

"No. I said as much during that lunch, in front of the professor and our peers, and I'm saying so to you now. I have no desire to spin around in circles among the rest of the idiots that go here."

"Dancing is fun! There'll be really good food and drink, too. The social aspect is what's most important, though. You'll make memories!"

Felix sneers. "For you and your insatiable lust, maybe, but I'm perfectly content on my own, doing things more productive than socializing."

"Do you know how depressing you just sounded?" Sylvain glances about for someone friendly nearby to support him, but the others at the training ground have learned to avert their gaze when Felix is there. Fortunately, Ingrid has just walked in. "Ingrid! Guess what Felix said."

"You don't know when to quit, do you?" she replies with a smile, grabbing a wooden practice sword from the wall.

"You didn't guess what he said!"

"It's obvious, isn't it? He doesn't want to go to the ball and you're pestering him. Don't try to drag me into this to help convince him. He won't change his mind and we both know this."

"Thank you, Ingrid, for having a brain," Felix mumbles, briskly walking away from Sylvain to hang up his sword.

Undeterred, if disappointed by his friends, Sylvain goes after him, tossing the straw man carelessly behind him. "You don't dance badly, if that's what you're embarrassed about."

"Learn to take 'no' for an answer," Felix snaps, whirling to him, hair disheveled from his time spent swinging his sword around – and, Sylvain notes, unintentionally decorated with remains of the straw man. "I'm not playing hard-to-get like your _girls_."

"Fine." But he smiles, reaching out to pick the bits of straw from Felix's hair. "What a bore you are, Felix. I'm going to eat all the meat-based dishes they serve so I can tell you about them later in excruciating detail–" He shuts himself up, realizing he isn't getting anything out of Felix. Not a barbed reply, not a swat at his hands. With a dumbfounded expression, Felix does nothing to stop Sylvain from fixing his hair. Precisely because of it, Sylvain stops. "Are... you okay there, Felix? Oh, is it because I called you a bore? That was b-o-r-e, not 'boar' like you're so fond of calling His Highness. No need to be offended about a comparison that wasn't there."

That seems to do it.

Felix takes one very large step back. "Leave me alone," he says, strained. The giant doors' wooden closing booms in Sylvain's teeth as he watches Felix go.

"I grew up with him," Sylvain says aloud, "but sometimes I think I don't get him at all. It's like thinking I understand the moon because it's always there, but I can't reach it to know if my assumptions are true."

Ingrid has walked up to him. She pats his armored shoulder, metal thudding dully. "If it makes you feel better, I don't always get him either. But at least this much is obvious: listen to him. You _were_ being annoying."

He rubs the back of his neck. "I was?"

"Yes. He told you as much."

"Yeah, but I thought that was Felix being Felix." He sighs, beginning to unbuckle his armor. "I need to go apologize."

It hadn't been long since Felix left, but Sylvain does not find him in the hall. Nor is he in his room. He couldn't have returned to the training ground – they would have chanced upon each other – and so Sylvain wanders through the monastery, hoping he catches that dark head of hair somewhere. But Garreg Mach is too grand for one person to explore, certainly with hidden rooms only the long-dead remember, and he doesn't find him.

The day of the ball, Felix continues to elude him. He doesn't answer his room's door – if he is even there. The training ground remains empty of his presence. Out of desperation, Sylvain checks their classroom, but he isn't there, either. He asks around, and there are claims that Felix was in the dining hall, or the library, or by the pond. Sylvain follows up on the information to no avail.

So he's being purposefully avoided. Alright. It isn't the first time it happens.

It _is_ the first time it causes Sylvain to search, unrepentant, rather than waiting for Felix's mood to pass. The notion of doing nothing but waiting leaves a restless pit in his stomach; he needs to make his apology. If it isn't accepted, that's fine. But he must make it.

Night trickles in, as does the chill of this Moon's temperament. Students, too, begin to meander to the ball. Some go alone, some with friends, some with people they hold quite close. They flow to the ball with its herald of warm light and soft music. Caught in the opposite direction of the crowd, with his height's advantage Sylvain looks over the crowd to see if Felix is here.

He isn't. Sylvain should not be surprised, but that pit in his stomach grows.

_Fine. Have it your way, Felix_, he thinks. _I refuse to not have fun because of you._

He merges with the crowd, face pulled into the smile he's wholly perfected. It does him well right away. The chandelier light falls on him, and then the girls. None of them outright ask him to dance – he's found they prefer him to do the gallantry – but the question is in their downcast eyes, their close proximity, their feet pointing to the dance floor.

"Would you care for a dance with me?" he asks, again and again, the words void of meaning by the first time he speaks them.

Again and again, the answer is yes. The movements always the same. And each girl glows as if any of this is unique, as if these experiences haven't been wearing down this hall for years, not to mention the other girls Sylvain twirls one after the other. The checkerboard floor is swirling under his feet; the lights are uncomfortably heating up his exposed collarbones.

"Sorry, I need to rest a bit," he tells the girl of the moment, backing away to lean against a wall.

She nods at him, though a friend soon sees her and they go off to chat. Alone, a bit of the tension in Sylvain's muscles loosens. He tips his head back to the wall, closing his eyes, rubbing them.

_Have I eaten today?_ he thinks. He can only remember spending his day looking for Felix.

"You look awful," says a voice. "Has a lady spurned you?"

The stars he'd self-pressed onto his eyes flicker away. There stands Lorenz, a drink in each hand, one of which he offers to Sylvain.

"No," Sylvain says, taking the drink. He smirks. "Are you trying to take a girl's place? I'm sad to say, but you can't."

Lorenz laughs. "I simply came to check on you after I spotted you. I wasn't lying when I said you looked awful."

"I'm fine." He sips the drink. Fizzy, nonalcoholic. Sweet. _Felix would hate t__his_. He forces a smile. "Thanks for worrying about me. I think I just need some food. Excuse me."

Tables toward the back boast many flute drinks alongside finger food in dainty presentation. Most of it is pastries. _Felix would have _really_ hated this_. Sylvain should have listened to him; Felix knew what was best for himself. Forcing him along would have only fulfilled Sylvain's own wishes. He'd had no consideration for Felix being genuine about his dislike of the ball.

_I may_, he thinks, picking up a bite of a pastry,_ have been a complete jerk_. He swallows without chewing, not tasting it at all, perusing the food selection for something Felix would– ah, there. A bit of spiced meat through a skewer. He leaves behind his drink to grab two skewers, bumping his way out of the ball and to the halls that lead him to the training ground.

He'd been there often, hoping Felix would make his eventual return. He hadn't, and perhaps it's foolish to hope this time is any different. But it is the first place Sylvain thinks of to resume his search. The place that feels right.

For good reason, it seems. The moonlight streaming from above gleams like a liquid off Felix's sword as he swings it at invisible foes: an upwards thrust that flows effortlessly downward, feet nimble as the attack's orientation changes. The sword is like a limb, offensive and defensive, swooping to Felix's will. It's a one-man dance in the lengthening shadows. So absorbed is he the doors' creaking open had not disrupted him.

"Wow," Sylvain says, quietly, more a breath than an utterance.

Against all reason, this is what Felix hears, his sword's path smoothly curving to point at the intruder, the practiced threat made real. "Who–_ Sylvain_?"

"Please don't point that at me. The dagger was frightening enough, and that thing is way bigger." He cautiously extends a hand, holding a skewer out. "I brought you food. From the ball."

Felix sheathes the sword – it is his own, nestled against his leg – and just as cautiously takes the skewer. "Oh. Thanks," he mumbles.

"I didn't bring you a drink because it was sweet."

"It's fine," he says behind his hand as he eats.

This conversation is floundering, but fortunately it's not the primary reason for his being here. He switches the topic. "Where have you been? I couldn't find you."

Despite the lack of proper light, Sylvain sees Felix's eyes have narrowed. "None of your concern."

"No, it's definitely my concern! You ran away because of me!" He breathes in. Out. Levels his voice. "I wanted to apologize for the other day. You told me exactly how you felt about the ball and I tried to force you into changing that. It wasn't right. I'm sorry."

Silence seeps up from the stones, cold as they are.

"Are you eating that?" Felix says, pointing to the other skewer.

Sylvain glances down at it, having forgotten he'd had it. "No. It's for you, too." He gives it to him, turning his eyes away as Felix eats. Where the moonlight does not strike the walls, a darkness so thick pervades it seems there is nothing there at all. "So... my apology. Do you accept it?"

"It's fine."

He breathes out again, shoulders relaxing. "Thank you." He faces him, feeling half a smile coming on. "You had me worried, not knowing where you disappeared to."

A ringing, fumbling _twang_ as the metal skewers hit the ground, Felix having tossed them thoughtlessly aside. "Spar with me," he says.

It's not the response Sylvain had been expecting, but it is not a response out of line with Felix. He chuckles. "You got it," he says, heading for where the practice swords hang. "I owe you that much."

"Yes, you do," he hears behind him, and something like a smile in it.

He grabs the first two swords he sees, tossing one to Felix, who swiftly catches it, sliding onto his starting pose. Sylvain jogs back, crossing his sword to Felix's, pose mirroring his. He grins, and the battle begins: one's swings abruptly cut by the other, moves predictable only by a lifetime watching Felix practice them countered with less ease than Sylvain will admit, lunges, parries, defensive and offensive stances, feet shuffling back and forth. They dance to no music but that of their arrhythmic oaken clacking, to no light but the wane moon spilling silver on the cold courtyard. Their skills are matched and they cannot close the distance, but heat from the effort burns in Sylvain's chest, lungs digging deep for air.

Pushed on by Felix, Sylvain's feet have ended at an awkward angle, and he is briefly distracted in fixing how they point. It's enough for Felix to spin behind Sylvain, pulling him down and back with his free hand tight around his arms keeping them stiffly in place, sword tip to the bump of his neck. The distance has closed, and Felix's breathing is as needy and hot as Sylvain's.

"You," Felix says, heaving, "are dead."

Sylvain swallows, the motion making the harmless sword tip prod his skin. He grins, tired. "If I have to die," he says, eyes drifting up, Felix upside-down in this pale night, "it can only be by your hand."

Felix humphs. He lets Sylvain go without notice; Sylvain stumbles, catching himself. "What sort of line is that?" Felix asks, hand extended.

Sylvain gives him the sword, shrugging. "The truth."

"We promised only death would part us," Felix says, frowning. "If I–" He clamps his mouth shut. "Never mind." He goes to hang the swords up.

Sylvain, concerned he'd misspoke, ignores that last request. And he realizes: if Felix killed him, where would their promise leave Felix himself?

"I shouldn't have said that," Sylvain says, going after Felix. "I hope we both die very, very old of natural causes at the same time. You're at my castle, we're finishing dinner; you're across from me when you finally, genuinely smile at me, even though you're very wrinkled and toothless, and–"

"Sylvain," Felix says, a warning tone.

"What? I was apologizing."

"Yes, and I accept it, whatever. But not what was about to come out of you." Under the awning the weaponry hold is in, it's impossible to discern Felix's face, but Sylvain allows himself to think he's coloring.

He laughs. "You don't want to hear about my vision of you as a centenarian?"

"_No_." He steps into the moonlight. And he is stern as ever. But then: a smile, so tiny it could be the shadows playing on his face, but Sylvain chooses to believe otherwise. "Thank you for sparring with me. Still, you should train more often. Only then could you hope to beat me."

"Hey," Sylvain says, though he's smiling easily as he crosses his arms, "let's use lances next time. Doubt you're so sure of yourself then."

Felix, humming, appraises him. "It's a match, then," he says, and the smile is no trick of the dark.

"Sure!" He claps his forehead, suddenly remembering. "Oh, but it can't be the day after tomorrow. I promised this girl in town I'd take her–"

The smile disappears. "I see. Goodnight, Sylvain." The clicking of his shoes, fading as he goes past the doors, leaving Sylvain alone in the courtyard, is the true ending for their dance. 

* * *

The monastery's stone walls, immovable as they are meant to be, compress upon its inhabitants. The cold is as intoxicating as wine for the stones, and it seeps onto everything – air, clothes, skin – with unparalleled greed. It goes well with the mood, gloomy as the constantly overcast skies. Something heavier than the promise of a harsh winter is in every chilly gust of wind, in every whisper in the hallways, in every letter from home offered to the hearth after its reading: war.

It is only a dim possibility for now. But one nonetheless. It is a word they all know, a word that appears often in the history lectured away or written in crumbling pages. It is not a word most of the students can attribute to lived experience. Those who have are haunted by the blood and bones of the past, and that such atrocity could return renders them ghostly themselves.

The unease is undeniable. The three houses, each founded on different ancestry, squint suspiciously to the other two. Within the Blue Lions, all eyes turn to Dimitri, who nearly shakes in his boots with something none of them can name, not even those who grew up with him. Fear? Bloodlust? Both?

Sylvain isn't fully immune to the mounting tension. He finds distractions in women. As always. Despite it, he cannot bring himself to assume his shallow persona. He isn't sure who he is as flattery oozes out of him and a delicate hand is twined in his that he startles at. It isn't the Sylvain he'd put effort into being known for. But neither is it the closest self to his core.

More worrisome yet is that Felix, stalwart as his blade, does not go unaffected. People not close to him wouldn't notice a change in him. He still scowls, still glares, still cuts with his words. But Sylvain has kept his eyes on him for the better part of his life, and the spiked wall Felix has built around himself has never been this thick or this riddled by cracks. The more he acts like it, the less Sylvain believes his behavior is genuine.

He says nothing of it. He couldn't, not without the branding of hypocrite scorching his skin. He braves it. Accepts it. It doesn't bother him – if this is what Felix must do to keep well, it is what he must do.

Though Sylvain tries to mollify him, in his own way. Laughing and agreeing with the insults jabbed at him, humming noncommittally at those leveled to others. Bringing him food or inviting him out for a bite.

At the end of one of Hanneman's lectures, his parchment scribbled in random geometric patterns he has no memory of doing, he approaches Felix.

"I'm half-asleep after that," he says. "Go with me to the training ground so I wake up?"

Felix's look of surprise is swiftly replaced by something quiet on his face. "You never pay attention to his lectures," he says, that quietness replaced by his usual indifference. "Why this new development?"

"You're questioning my good intent? When I'm offering you what you're always nagging me to do?" He dramatically brings his hand to his heart.

Felix knits his eyebrows together. "Are you planning something?"

"No. Why do you think that?"

He stops walking and crosses his arms, glare aimed to the stone floor. "You've been weirdly attentive to me lately."

"Is that a bad thing?"

Felix hesitates. "No, but–"

"Then there you go!" Sylvain says, clapping him on the shoulder, getting a yelp out of him. "I think sometimes you forget I'm actually your friend, Felix. I care about you. Times are tense, so I'm here more than ever."

Felix squeezes his own arms, once, with a _humph_. Then he drops them by his sides, resuming walking.

There are more people in the training ground than usual – in the time off between classes, many students, consciously or not, are drawn to the place for honing the skills that they'd need should their country call. To Sylvain, it certainly seemed that was Felix's motivation for his increased training. That, and the immersion, body and soul, of wielding a weapon as to preserve those very things. A convenience and a distraction, his training.

In the armory, Felix heads for the swords, but Sylvain stops him.

"Remember what I said the night of the ball?" he says. "We'd use lances next time we sparred." He reaches for them, their weight and length right in his hand. Nothing like the limitations of the sword that Felix prefers. But it is better for each of them to best a different weapon, he thinks. In battle, they can cover for the other weapon's inherent flaws this way. As they have before. As, Sylvain hopes, they will continue to do so. Regardless of his thoughts, he grins, handing Felix the other lance. "I'll win this time."

Felix quirks his lip up, Sylvain's rare challenge bringing truth to it. "We'll see about that."

They go to the stables for their mounts. Sylvain, as a cavalier, has one of his own, a stallion chuffing as it recognizes him.

"Hi, Beauty!" he says, rubbing the side of the stallion's body. "Are you ready to beat Felix today?"

Felix makes a disgusted noise.

"Was that at my horse's excellent name," Sylvain says, saddling Beauty, "or that you know you're losing?"

Felix prepares the first horse he sees that does not snub him. "You have a stallion, and you called him Beauty–"

"So no one can deny I have Beauty on the battlefield!"

"–just for a joke. See?" He leads his readied horse out of the stable.

Sylvain hops onto Beauty and catches up, looking down at Felix from higher up than normal, to Felix's dismay. "Stallions can be beautiful, too. Look at him, he's the nicest horse in the whole school. Probably the continent."

"It's a name for a mare, not a stallion."

"I can't agree with that. Beauty doesn't discriminate. You're beautiful, for one."

The grounds are grass, chewed to thinness by the horses, and Felix manages to trip over that, held up only by his hand tight on his stallion's reins. "_What_?"

"You have a very nice face. It's your personality that keeps people away, but if you worked on it a little, you'd have lines of girls–"

Felix climbs on top of his horse, tugging the reins and kicking it to trot away. They turn around, facing Sylvain, the horse indifferent while Felix seethes so deeply he's turning red. "Raise your lance, Sylvain!"

He does, though with some wariness. "I meant that as a compliment!" he says, but it gets lost in the thumping of Felix's horse's hooves, stirring dirty grass clumps as he charges Sylvain with the lance, despite its harmless blunt end, aimed to hurt.

It's a reckless attack, incited by anger, and Sylvain easily dodges it, reigning Beauty aside. Felix rushes by, stabbing air.

"If you're going to let what I say get to you," Sylvain says, readying his horse for the next charge certainly coming, "you're not gonna do very well in battle!"

"Shut _up_!" Felix says, and he's not thinking or listening – he comes at Sylvain the same way.

Expecting it, Sylvain casually blocks Felix's lance, barely raising his arm as Felix strains to counter his strength. "Felix, you're better than this. Why is being called 'beautiful' bothering you, anyway? I wasn't comparing you to my horse, just the general concept of–"

All the pressure Felix is pushing back with suddenly stops, and Sylvain's lance goes down with nothing to hold it up. Immediately, Felix hurries to swing the lance around and jab Sylvain.

Sylvain blocks this as well, eyes sharpened, grunting. "Alright, I'll congratulate you for that stunt."

"Do you _ever_ stop talking?"

"Not when I want someone to listen." He grips his other hand to the lance's hilt, this greater power batting Felix's lance away; Felix quickly retreats before Sylvain can attack. "Would you prefer I said you were 'handsome' instead? Is that a manly enough word for you?"

"Do you talk like this in real battle, too? Maybe you irritated your enemies to death."

He shouldn't, but Sylvain grins. "You're handsome, Felix!" He kicks Beauty to a run, lance aimed to the heavens rather than Felix.

Felix's horse runs to him too, with the man himself readying his lance to Sylvain's chest, unprotected as he's left it.

And before Felix can thrust his arm out, Sylvain swivels sideways on Beauty, hanging on by his feet on the stirrups, swiping the lance up and sideways to knock Felix off his mount. Beauty continues advancing, and Sylvain does not see Felix fall, but he hears it: something heavy thudding on the grass, a muffled _oof_, a horse coming to rest without its master to guide it.

Sylvain uprights himself and turns Beauty around to see Felix crumpled on the ground.

Victory tastes stale.

He hurriedly dismounts, throwing the lance aside, and rushes to Felix's side, carefully turning him over to examine any wounds. "Felix?"

He groans. "I'm conscious."

Sylvain relaxes. "Where does it hurt? I don't want to help you up and make things worse."

"My head. Are you going to find some girl to gloat about this to?" Felix says, wincing as Sylvain touches a sore spot on the back of his head.

He frowns. "No. I do have other aspects to my personality; you should know that. More importantly, I think we need to get you to the infirmary." He puts a hand to Felix's back, the other clasped to Felix's own, as he gently hoists him up.

"Do you find that much comfort in them?"

His hands stay where they are. His expression stills with the crackle of ice forming over water. "Hmm?"

Felix is glancing away. "In women."

He hadn't needed clarification; he'd known what the question implied. It's that it has been asked by Felix that he doesn't know what to do with.

"For all that you blather about them," Felix continues, "you never keep to one–"

"Of course I do!" Sylvain says, belatedly, a smile carved roughly onto the ice.

Felix fixes him with a glare. "No, you don't."

"The comfort part. Not the commitment part." His laugh has no humor in it. "Even I know that much."

A curl of the lip accompanies the glare. Felix shakes himself free of Sylvain, who had not let him go. "I can get to Manuela on my own," he says, holding his head with no subtlety. "Put away my horse and lance for me."

"What, no 'please'?" Sylvain asks after him.

He'd definitely heard, but he does not reply.

Sylvain obliges anyway. He goes to the infirmary right after, but Felix is no longer there.

"It was just a bump," Manuela says, "so I gave him ice in a kerchief and sent him to his room–"

"Thank you!" Sylvain says, jogging away before she finishes speaking.

To his surprise, Felix opens his room door for him, though he does answer it with a miffed, "I'm fine."

"I know, Manuela told me, but I wanted to see you. I felt bad."

"Why?" The hand holding the kerchief to his head shifts. "It was a mock battle well fought. You won; savor that."

"No, not that." He looks behind Felix, to the austere neatness of his room, much the same as it had been when he'd spent the night here – but now awash with the light he'd run away at. "Can I come in a second? I think it'll be better if we can speak alone."

Felix is regarding him warily, but he slowly steps to the side. Sylvain walks in, the door thudding close behind him just as he dryly swallows. It seals in the stuffy air, makes disentangling the words in his head difficult.

But he does, somehow.

"Why did you ask me about finding comfort in women?" he says, turning to face Felix, who grimaces.

"_That's_ why you wanted to talk to me in private?"

"That other time I was here," Sylvain says, "something was bothering you about my– well, you know. But you never told me what it was." He rubs the back of his neck, unable to meet Felix's eyes. "Is this related?"

That Felix says nothing with such emphatic emptiness could mean Sylvain is right, or that is he is very, very wrong.

He goes on, keeping his eyes to the window. "I won't know how to help you if you won't trust me and tell me. Are you embarrassed to tell me what's bothering you? We go way back; you shouldn't be."

He chances a glance at Felix, still eerily quiet.

A smattering of red is across Felix's cheeks.

Sylvain startles. This confirms that whatever Felix cannot say, it embarrasses him. What would embarrass him in seeing Sylvain cavort with any girl he pleased?

He blinks, realizing.

"Do you," Sylvain says, with the caution he would use in the battlefield, "want someone, too?"

Felix's lips move, but no sound comes out.

Sylvain leans forward, an eyebrow raised. "I didn't hear you."

"I said _leave_!" Felix says, shoving Sylvain with both hands, kerchief falling out of his hand, the ice within it sliding off from its own melt.

Sylvain clamps his hands around Felix's wrists. "Felix, please! Can you be honest with me? Was I right?"

Felix's breathing is fluttery, just as the movement of his eyes, just as the pulse Sylvain feels under his fingers.

_I was right_, Sylvain thinks, and something wrings his innards of their blood. He ignores this painful discomfort. "It's not embarrassing to want someone. Why do you think I do it? It's nice to be touched and wanted. Even if it's just for a single night. You don't need commitment for intimacy. Things are tense right now and if you also want to not think about it by spending a night with a girl, I understand." He's talked for a bit with no interruptions; that of itself surprises him. He has nothing else to say, and neither does Felix, his breathing raggedly intruding this imposing silence.

Sylvain bites the inside of his lip, needing to fill this stuffiness with something. There is a thought on the tip of his tongue held back only by his teeth at his lip, but to let it go might worsen everything.

But it's better than allowing it to fester, isn't it?

"Do you want me to find you a girl?" Sylvain asks, calm as the Saints, with none of their sacred intent.

So he's asked it. He doesn't particularly want an answer.

He doesn't get one. Felix whips his hands free and brusquely pushes past Sylvain, leaving him in Felix's own room with the mockery of winter's daylight unfeeling on his skin.

He'd like to chase after Felix, even if he is unsure of what he'd say – it wouldn't be an apology, exactly, as there is nothing Sylvain thinks he's erred on. Maybe another supplication for Felix to answer him with words and not the perplexity of his emotions; apparent as they might be to someone who knows him as well as Sylvain, he needs to hear it.

He'd like to, but he knows better than to do so.

A day, he will wait a day for Felix to simmer down and then get that answer out of him. Really, it's not doing Felix any good to repress what he wants. Sylvain can help him with that. Really. If they are to be summoned to Faerghus for the blue-blooded warriors they've been trained to be, the least Felix could do before it is get a girl to bed. It is unlikely _he_ does anything of it; Sylvain can help. Really! For once the habits Felix often derides him for can help him.

But first, Sylvain waits. 

* * *

A day goes by. Except for the distance Sylvain purposefully keeps from Felix, nothing is different from him. Thrice he meets his eyes during classes, thrice Sylvain mildly smiles, thrice Felix huffs. Sylvain takes it for a good sign that Felix is acting as he is wont to be, and at lunch, he sits in front of him.

"How's your head?" he asks.

"Better," Felix answers, staring at his food as if it's insulted him.

"Is there any salve you want me to get for you? More ice?"

"No." He aggressively stabs the slab of meat on his plate, juices dribbling out.

"That was my bad for not getting protective equipment before our sparring." He goes for a grin. "Though you could have pestered me about it, too."

Felix eats, eyes on the food.

"We'll be ready next time," Sylvain says, filling up the space between them with whatever comes to mind, despite the din of the hall. "Because I'm sure you'll want a rematch."

Slowly, Felix picks his head up. He does not speak, but in the look he gives Sylvain it's obvious he too is aware of what they are avoiding, and of the winding route Sylvain is treading to get to it. He does not speak, but if he had, it would not have been heard over Annette and Ashe's lively conversation as they approach the table. The table fills up with the rest of their peers, many voices overlapping, beckoning Sylvain and Felix in. Felix continues his one-word answers; Sylvain joins in the merriment, though his eyes dart to Felix too much for him to say he's fully involved in any of it.

It's still too soon to ask. 

* * *

The following day, Felix is unchanged. Avoiding Sylvain, except where his eyes have strayed to him in class. Curt replies given to small questions.

Only two days and Sylvain is mentally crafting the very apology he'd thought was unnecessary.

_Dear Felix_, he thinks, laying on his bed, one leg crossed over the other. He pauses. _I'm apologizing in person, not over a letter_. He crosses his other leg_. Felix, I'm sorry I riled you up. I didn't think I'd sound insincere. Our priorities are different, I realize that now, but I didn't mean you harm, just help. I won't– yeah, this apology isn't going to do. _He folds his hands on his chest._ It's hard to apologize when I don't know what I did wrong_. His eyes drift over the room, these close quarters that have seen many a girl – and the occasional guy.

With his next blink, methodical, he remembers being in Felix's room, a neater version of his own, and how the last thing they'd exchanged, the very thing that had exploded Felix's anger, was when Sylvain asked him if it was a guy Felix was taken with.

So. He'd been approaching this with as much tact as a horse loose at church. No wonder Felix didn't want to talk about it.

_I can still find him a guy_, he thinks. _If I let him know, maybe he'll ease up a bit_.

He decides it, for the sake of his friend. Despite the knot his stomach is getting itself into. 

* * *

He finds Felix at the marketplace, waiting at the blacksmith's with arms crossed and an impatient expression. If he is there, it must be because his sword is being repaired. If he has his sword, this could end poorly for Sylvain.

Nevertheless, he walks to him, waving widely so Felix sees him in time, giving him a chance to avoid him if he should want. Felix does not move, though even at this distance Sylvain thinks he can hear his harrumph.

"Did your sword dull?" Sylvain asks, taking a seat on a barrel.

"Of course not. The Professor sent me here to pick something up in their stead."

"Oh, right," Sylvain says, nodding, "you sharpen your own swords."

In the forge, the blacksmith clangs away, the fire crackling. Beside him, Felix shifts his weight to his other leg.

"I think," Sylvain says, only just above the flames, "you know why I'm here."

"To talk my ear off with your asininity?"

"You can call me all the names you want after I'm done," he says, "but let me finish, alright?"

From the corner of his eye, Felix considers him. "Fine."

"Thank you." He looks down at his hands. "I had the wrong idea. It's not a girl you'd prefer to be with, is it?"

"_Sylvain_!" Felix says loudly, drawing a few passersby's curiosity.

"You said you'd let me finish!" he protests, standing, having to look down at Felix as he always has. That glare of Felix's is nothing unusual, either, but the color on his face is.

_You really give yourself away_, he thinks, is on the verge of saying it when the blacksmith exits the forge.

"Apologies for the wait. It's done."

Felix hurriedly steps away from Sylvain, taking the sheathed sword without a thanks, tossing back a jingling bag of coins without looking. Sylvain follows – on the side opposite the sword.

"I'm not judging! I've messed around with guys before."

"I _know_."

"Yes, you do, and you should also know that I was being serious when I asked if you wanted me to find someone for you. I know it has to be a guy now, misunderstanding cleared, but first you need to tell me what you actually want instead of blushing and trying to flee like every other time."

Felix weaves through the market crowd, Sylvain trailing after, catching up to him as he flies up the steps to the monastery.

"There's no shame in saying you do, Felix! Let me help you by telling me yes or no instead of me guessing based on how red you are. Is it that you don't want someone you don't know so close to you? Because if that's it, I can take care of you!"

He's said it so intensely his heart is stretching the skin at his chest thin. He'd not meant to get so loud. But it had happened.

He'd not meant for them to come to a stop on the stairs either, but it seems they have. Felix is one step in front, and it puts him level with Sylvain's eyes. There are no other students ambling up the stairs. It is the two of them, lonely figures on a wide stretch of stone. Sylvain looks down. Goes over the mortar in between the stones, uneven roads connecting the whole of it. Small stones, big stones, in gray and brown and all drabness in between.

He waits for Felix. Nothing happens.

The tension in his stomach is tighter, and he picks his head up so quickly his breath briefly falters, and his words fumble out again. "I can take care of you."

The white of Felix's eyes are stark. Have they ever been this wide? They always bore into everything with scornful sharpness. As they are now, they're like twin moons, and his hair under the sun blue as midnight.

"Having someone with you is nice," Sylvain continues. "Even if it's for a little while. We all want comfort, especially at our weakest. I can be that for you. I'm alright with it."

Felix just _stares_.

"Of course, this depends on you being alright with it," he finishes, and did his voice shake there? "I won't be offended if you say–"

"Fine."

Sylvain's mouth is open from his prattling, but now, nothing comes out except a quiet, "Huh?"

"If I agree to– to whatever you have in mind that you've been bothering me about lately, will it shut you up?"

He thinks about what has just happened, unbidden as it had been. Still uncertain what he or Felix have said is real, and to keep it as secretive as he can here in the open, he leans forward. "Felix, I'm not going to make you do anything you don't want to."

Perhaps uncomfortable with the distance, Felix leans away from him, but combined with the flash of anger in his eyes, Sylvain's lungs wring. "So was this a joke to you?"

"No! I was– I thought you might genuinely want someone to... you know. But you're you and I'm me and this is the apparently ineffective way I went about to try to cheer you up." He tips his head down. "I'm sorry. I never meant to hurt you, now or any other time I asked about this."

Felix's scoff is a whisper of a thing, like breeze-stirred dead leaves against stone. "I said 'fine,' didn't I? Let's see if you're worth your salt."

Sylvain looks up, disbelieving. "You're really agreeing?"

"Yes, but if you keep being annoying about it, I will change my mind."

"And you're treating it like a contest?" A smile twitches on his face. "This isn't sword fighting."

"I am not! I only wish to know if the philandering you're always rambling on about is founded on truth." He crosses his arms, the sword tucked under his arm. He looks aside. "Somehow, I highly doubt it."

Sylvain climbs the next step, regaining the height he has on Felix. "You'll see," he says, with what is supposed to be the wink and smile he can conjure up like magic, if less real. But it comes out subdued. Troubled, almost.

Felix crosses his arms tighter, the leather sheath squeaking under his clothes.

"Wait," Sylvain says. "The Professor's sword. We should drop that off first."

Felix uncrosses his arms, holding up the sword as if he'd forgotten he had it. "Yes."

They return to the school, Felix leading the way, as this is the duty the Professor had given him; Sylvain has tagged along, unnecessary to this, necessary after. A delivery to a professor and then sex with his childhood friend.

_You know_, he thinks, finding himself unable to walk by Felix's side, instead staying a bit behind him, _normal things_.

He waits for Felix outside the classroom, suddenly and acutely aware of what they are going to do. Of their walking together, innocent to anyone watching because they did not know what they'd agreed to. Whatever rumors may arise of it, as with other flings, would never bother Sylvain. It's Felix he worries about – what will be said of him, how he would react.

But. The two of them can keep a secret, especially one such as this that will bind them. If they are careful, no one else will know. No mess. A one-time affair fated to burial.

Felix walks out, arms crossed again, eyes pointedly not on Sylvain's. It occurs to Sylvain that Felix is not holding his arms as much as holding himself together.

"You're sure?" he asks, quietly. Once it happens, it cannot be taken back.

"Yes," Felix replies, even quieter.

For lack of anything else to do, Sylvain nods.

He's had girls in his room. Not every instance ended with both of them undressed, but the need for touch was there in the way Sylvain held their hands guiding them through the halls, or how they smiled nervously, his door creaking inwards as he gently ushered them in, their eyes on his lips. There had been a desire on both their parts, mixed with the exhilaration of doing something like this at a monastery. The girls were always blushing.

The walk to his room with Felix a foot behind him has nothing of this. In this odd establishment of distance, but with the same destination, it feels more like Felix is coming to inspect something in Sylvain's room. Sylvain glances over his shoulder and sees Felix's eyes dart everywhere but on him. The illicitness about this tastes more like a blasphemy they've commit themselves to than mindless fun. It's uncomfortable in Sylvain's own stomach, and he wonders, loud as a hymn, just what he's gotten them both into.

It's too late to rescind the offer. Besides, what would it say of him? How would Felix take it? He curls loose fists. _We'll be fine_. He'd escaped girls' angry brothers seeking revenge for the heartbreak he'd littered behind him. Sex with his childhood friend who attends the same school and is in the same house as him will be a beast in the room, actually, now that he considers the weight of his choice like it's oversized armor he's been slammed into as his room's door looms in front of them.

Felix's presence behind him impresses on him like a heavy ghost, there but perhaps a figment of the imagination, though the space he does take up is suffocating.

Sylvain breathes in, lungs nowhere close to capacity, and turns around, reaching for Felix's wrist, tugging him inside his room.

The door ponderously closes. All others Sylvain has been with in this very room had thrown themselves at him, and he'd allowed it, fingers deft in their hair or their shirts. But he's still holding on to Felix's wrist, stiffly, as they stand in front of one another avoiding the other's eyes. He's never had to consciously begin anything; it had always just happened and intensified when inside his room. Murmuring questions about preferences to a girl's skin as he undid the laces on her clothing did him well, but even then they'd already begun kissing.

In this, he's as lost as Felix.

Slowly, he drops Felix's hand. Slower yet, he steps to him, the tips of their shoes meeting. Closeness is always a good choice.

"I," he says, quietly, because something tells him Felix needs to hear him, "am going to kiss you, if that's alright."

Felix's shoulders shake in what goes for a wordless accord.

Sylvain touches his cheek with the mindfulness he'd use in handling a blade.

Felix's face is scrunched up, eyes shut tight, mouth pursed almost to nothingness. Were this any other person he was about to kiss, Sylvain would have affectionately mocked him, acting as if this is a battle he is confronting, not another's touch. But it is Felix in front of him, one of his oldest friends, long adorned by thorns that Sylvain will prickle himself with if he's not careful.

He leans in, but not completely. Felix's light breathing quivers on his skin. His own has stopped completely, lungs contracted to their tightest. He's kissed boys before. The problem here is that this kiss will have history behind it. It will have a name and a face that stretch into his memories, and once it happens, he cannot slip away and sleep it away. It will be there, unspoken but mutually knowing, in his relationship with Felix. It will be a thing that happens and cannot be taken back.

For anything else, Felix would have snapped at him by now for his reluctance. But he also waits for something to give, that last exhale of his unsteady, and then cut entirely when Sylvain presses his lips to his.

It is as if it's his first kiss. Their noses bump at this awkward meeting; Sylvain hadn't tilted his head, forgetful idiot that he is. Felix had kept his lips drawn, and there's not much there to kiss. To ease Felix he holds him by the forearms, bringing him close and upwards with ungentle force. Beginner mistakes, the lot of it.

And, like a first kiss, momentous as it is, the warmth in Sylvain's chest spreads, weakening his legs, increasing the beat of his heart. A beginner would latch on to the most minimal of contact and believe it a dream. Sylvain has kissed better than this. Still, he is weak. Inexplicably. Terribly.

One of his hands returns to Felix's cheek, their mouths soft on one another as Felix gives way. He's never been this terribly conscious of what every part of him is doing; he's always known what it is he needed to do to melt the person in his arms. The insecurities and doubts are overwhelming, trembling in his hands as he blindly unbuttons Felix's shirt, lips going to the smooth curve of his neck, helplessly drawn to it as it is further revealed.

Felix obviously has never done anything like this; he has no basis for what he is to do. Hesitantly he puts his arms around Sylvain, neither bringing him closer nor pushing him away. They're simply there.

If Sylvain does this right, Felix won't need to think about what he is doing. Swept by the moment, it'll just happen.

The vest is off. Next the white shirt, buttons damnably tiny. Felix's patience rewarded with nipping at the small hollow of his throat, his collarbone like a toppled spire. A sound private as a prayer.

Sylvain glances up. That had come from Felix, his eyes squeezed shut, face pink. Felix could sound like that. Could look like this, pushing away a need that threatened to push _him_.

He eases Felix onto the bed. Felix lets him, accommodates him. Felix's hair, where loosened, streams like ink about him, his bun undone to his nape.

The sun itself – and not this Moon's sun, but the beast that flares in summer – has buried itself under Sylvain's skin. At his face, his chest, and low, low, lower than that, with a want so intense he abandons Felix's shirt for his pants, hand careless, seeking Felix, needing the physical affirmation this is mutual.

It is. And when he touches him, already hard, Felix makes another sound, something strangled, and he sinks onto the bed. Sylvain hasn't even done anything but touch him. What he, indomitable he, will fall to soon – Sylvain aches to see it.

One hand works Felix, gentle and warm as light, while the other cups his cheek as Sylvain leans down. "Even like this, you're beautiful," he murmurs a breath away from Felix's lips, a breath he now steals from him – no, it is willingly given to him, inexpertly and yet so desperately. Sylvain takes it, lets it and the failingly suppressed softness spilling from Felix consume him.

Felix's hands have stayed on his back, but where they were unsure they now grip his shirt with unspoken urgency. Sylvain's, too: he strokes him harder, reveling in Felix's forsaken restraint in his indistinct, lovely cries; he runs fingers through the bun that had clung to life, all of Felix's dark hair as much of a mess as he, he who presses himself to Sylvain, no more distance between them, not at all.

Felix wants this, Sylvain wants this; Sylvain gives and he takes and the stone of Felix's façade crumbles, fully, a last cry muffled to Sylvain's shirt as he finishes him. Felix's breathing comes in rough gasps, lungs the last of him shuddering. It, Sylvain distantly notes, matches the rhythm of his own breaths. Inhales and exhales together, coming down even so.

He extricates his hand from beneath Felix's pants, sticky warmth pooled in it wiped with the nearest kerchief.

It wasn't sex. But they've done... this. More than what was expected of their friendship, far less than other things Sylvain has gotten to with others. And still the beat of his heart is thunderous in his ears.

This is where the clearheadedness is meant to settle in. No more hindrance by primal desire. The path to composure.

It's not happening. The dizziness, despite Sylvain lying himself down beside Felix, has worsened. He looks to Felix, wondering if any of his confusion presents itself on him.

Felix's eyes are to the ceiling but unfocused, seeing something not there; his face is flushed; his chest, bare where Sylvain had unbuttoned his shirt, falls and rises precariously.

Sylvain isn't thinking, isn't certain he exists in his own body, as he reaches for Felix's face and kisses him, careful and slow, the final thing to seal this secret between them. A strand of Felix's hair gets in the way and he brushes it aside, close-eyed, fingers weaving deeper into the muss of his hair, soft and smelling of leather and oil, the weaponry and upkeep he obsesses with a part of him. Felix has picked something up from his insistence, but the way he kisses him back still is tinged with uncertainty.

_It's fine; don't be afraid to kiss me_, Sylvain thinks, hoping to the Goddess Felix can hear it, _I'll show you how_ I _melt, I'll show you_.

Felix pulls back, minutely, and Sylvain seeks him, but Felix stops him with his hand to Sylvain's mouth.

Sylvain's eyebrows come together. He tries to speak, but Felix's hand muffles it, his words becoming warmth.

"You and your stupid uniform," Felix says under his breath, and from the look on his face Sylvain knows he's trying not to smile. His hand slides down to Sylvain's chest. He'd altered the uniform so the coat is open, exposing the crisp white shirt – though it's ruffled now, from this.

"'Stupid'?" he says.

"Yours is already half-open but you choose to undo mine."

Sylvain pauses. "Did... you want me to take off my shirt?" He asks it with hesitance. Embarrassment. _Him_.

Felix sits up, buttoning his shirt. "It was just an observation."

Sylvain rests a hand on his cheek, propping himself by his elbow dimpling the mattress. "I was the one leading," he says, lips oddly pulled – a smile? "So it just kind of happened that I almost took off your clothes. Next time, you lead so you see mine off."

Now Felix pauses. "'Next time?'"

He'd definitely smiled because the stiffness on his face cannot be anything but the tightness of a smile gone wrong. "If you ever need it."

Felix's head is dipped, watching the buttons as he fastens them. His hair obscures his profile, anything that Sylvain might gauge for a wordless reply. As it is, he takes the discomforting silence as a refusal and the discomforting hollow in him as acceptance of a spoken mistake.

Felix's clothes are done up and smoothed out, though his hair remains poorly made. He tugs at his tie to let it all loose: it falls below his shoulders, flat where it had been held up through the day, ever slightly waved where the tension was lesser.

Sylvain's intake of breath is sharp, a whistle that gets Felix's attention.

"What?"

"You should wear your hair down sometimes," he says, dumbly, and adds to placate what might sound like a command, "if you want."

Felix keeps his hands as they are with his hair gathered in them, pulled high. "Hmph," he says, proceeding to tie and knot it up in a practiced movement. He would be good with his hands, wouldn't he, from his hair care and sword wielding.

Sylvain weakly clears his throat. "Do... you feel better?" he asks, immediately wincing. Who asks that?

Instead of a snippy retort or a scowl or a humph, Felix swings off the bed, and he gives the most imperceptible nod before slipping out, not another glance or word thrown back.

The door thumps close as quiet as something of its heft and height can be. The heart Sylvain unfortunately calls his own, as unnoticeable as it is meant to be in the sustenance of his life, shakes the very room from its madness.

He does not sleep. 

* * *

He spends the first few nights thereafter alone, the only thing darker than the room his heart's enslavement. He holds his hand out. This is the hand that wields his lance to draw blood. This is the hand that had touched Felix to draw softness from his edges. Sylvain didn't think anyone could wear him down so, much less him.

That must explain why breathing hurts and why Sylvain's mind always strays to Felix, warm and disheveled as he'd been at his fingertips. To get him like that was a feat of itself. Yes, that's it. What keeps his thoughts captive to Felix is pride in being the one to undo him.

He thinks nothing of the first girl, a raven-haired beauty, that he chases after when he can make himself do so, if with obvious insincerity. She picks up on it and doesn't hear the end of his glib words.

It's... relieving.

He has regained more of his usual charm with the next girl, who lets him press a kiss to the curve of her neck, her black hair swept aside. But she smells sweet; she's too short. He doesn't ask her out again.

It happens when he is at the pier, lazing idly, watching a pretty fishmonger daughter's dark hair too glow blue under the sunlight. She peeks up from her work, meets his eyes. He offers her an immediate, unthinking smile that she returns, and he thinks, _No, his hair's longer_.

The sun-glittering water sloshes in a mild breeze, far too loudly for it to be its true sound. It seems to be the same sensation burbling through the whole of him.

_'His'?_ he thinks, fingers curling under the old, wet wood beneath him_._

Ah. But he'd thought the fishmonger daughter's hair was blue under the sun like someone else's. This dark hair he'd been pursuing as of late that was never quite the right length or color or style, nor the girls quite tall or aloof or as familiar as time.

"Ah," he tells the waterfront, so very quietly that he might not have said it at all. But he need not have voiced that measly syllable to realize that what he has been seeking lately is Felix.

For any other person Sylvain wished to see once more, he'd simply go; refusals or false, pretty lies didn't hurt then. But this is different. This is _Felix_. A 'no,' and Sylvain still must roam the same halls he does. He'd carry that 'no' with him in their every encounter, unavoidable as they are from their shared houses, homeland, history. A one-time occurrence could be brushed aside, attributed to curiosity of youth. If Sylvain asks him again, the casualty of it becomes real. The excuse that he'd asked for Felix's sake would no longer stand.

While Sylvain spends his days in a haze, Felix has been no different. Were it not for the muddle perpetually beating from his heart to his head, Sylvain would not be sure anything had happened between them. When Sylvain greets him, hoping none of his feelings make it to his face, Felix answers with an impartial hum. He's glares and scowls and humphs, same as always. Their friendship, too. Sylvain should be thankful for it – under no circumstance does he want to lose Felix's good will, subdued as it is – but instead he finds himself worrying at his lip.

Is this how all the heartbroken girls he'd left waiting for him felt?

He sighs, flopping on his back. Immediately it proves to be a bad idea; the sodden wood wets his shirt, and it will certainly dirty it.

"What are you doing?"

He swivels his eyes to the voice's direction, knowing it is Felix before he sees him. There he is: upside down, larger than life, frowning at him. Though at this angle, it appears as a smile. Sylvain would like to see him smile more – it lightens him considerably, in turn Sylvain. But Felix guards himself, does not allow a modicum of vulnerability past him. Thorns on something beautiful.

Imagine that, him comparing Felix to a rose.

He presses the heels of his hands to his eyes, stars shooting up. He answers with a half-truth. "I was looking at the fishmonger's daughter."

When he opens his eyes, Felix's frown has deepened. "Should have known."

"What about you?" he says, to turn this conversation around.

"I came to purchase new boots."

"But you had to check up on me first?" There _he_ goes, saying things without thinking.

"You're in the way."

"Huh?"

"With you lying down, and the cat behind you, there's barely any room to pass by."

"Cat?" Sylvain sits up. A short distance from where his head had been, a tabby placidly sits with all paws tucked beneath it. He looks at Felix. "And you couldn't have stepped over it or moved it?"

"No." He bends, and Sylvain thinks it'll be to help him up, so he extends a hand. Instead, Felix scratches behind the cat's ears, Sylvain's hand dumbly reaching for nothing. Then Felix leaves, walking in between the space Sylvain's sitting up had opened up.

Well, then.

He laughs, following Felix.

"You're heartless," Sylvain tells him, throwing an arm around his shoulder to show he does not mean it.

Felix rolls his eyes. But does not shrug him off.

They head for the shoemaker, whose wares seem to Sylvain lesser than usual.

"Do you have any sheepskin boots from Gloucester?" Felix asks.

The shoemaker shakes her head. "'S been hard getting my merchandise, 'specially for high-quality items. Trouble's a-brewin', I tell ya."

Sylvain and Felix exchange a look. Rumors of trouble through the continent coursed through the monastery halls, but as with all such things, they were prone to exaggerations or lies. To hear a tradesperson speak of it, and to see it materialize in a lack of goods, validates what no student would confidently state.

"I hope things don't get worse," she says. She holds up a pair of boots. "No Gloucester finery, but these are from local sheepskin. Good stuff that'll last ya, even if they ain't normally fit for lordly feet like yours."

They prove a tad too large for Felix, but with an advance payment made for their purchase and refitting, the two of them leave. They pass the waterfront, where Felix thinks he's being discreet in glancing to see if the cat is still there. It isn't.

"Cheer up," Sylvain says, getting a questioning eyebrow raise from Felix. "It's not like the monastery is lacking in cats."

"Shut up," Felix says, jabbing his elbow into his ribs.

Sylvain laughs again, the sound fading delicately into the late winter air, though at the monastery gate it is fully smothered. He turns to Felix, who he finds already looking at him.

"Do you think things will get worse?" Sylvain asks.

"Internal turmoil within each of the nations isn't uncommon." Felix crosses his arms. "But this seems like it's more than that. There hasn't been a continent-wide war in years. Maybe..." He trails off.

"Maybe it's time?" Sylvain guesses, gut tight.

"Maybe."

"Hello, students!" says the gatekeeper, spotting them. "Coming in?"

"Yes," Felix says, uncrossing his arms.

They go in amid their fellow students, diverse in their representation of Fódlan's people. People their forebears have fought. Who they could fight now, if leaders – their own family, for some – decreed so.

"Felix," Sylvain says, suddenly, when Felix is walking his own way.

Felix stops, looking over his shoulder.

_Be with me again_, he thinks, having to purse his lips firmly to keep from saying such a stupid thing. He exhales. "Whatever happens," he says instead, slowly, thinking of each word before he speaks it, "I'll be by you."

Felix huffs. "I know. I can't get rid of you."

Sylvain smiles, because he knows what the spaces in between the thorny words mean. "No, you can't. 'Til death, remember?"

They'd promised as children to be together until death parted them, understanding nothing of the heaviness in it. Recalling it now, Sylvain realizes the words are just shy of a proposal.

Felix pauses, glancing aside. "Until death," he mumbles, walking away. 

* * *

Edelgard's colors are the same hue as the blood already defiling the forests, the streets, the tomb where she is unmasked. Fitting, perhaps. It is the same color with which Dimitri's rage burns, and in looking at him all know he has teetered off the cliff's edge. As the king-to-be, his break is not done on its lonesome. The whole of Faerghus will be fractured. None of the Blue Lions say it outright, but it is in their eyes as they privately voice their concerns for Dimitri. Of what is to come.

Instead, they fight. As they have been trained to do. They promise victory before fanning out to protect the monastery, whatever doubts each of them may have kept to themselves.

Sylvain means to see Felix before they are cast into the throes of battle. Just to see him, to exchange a meaningless 'good luck' Felix will snidely remark he doesn't need. For the slightest hint of normalcy before the reality of this fragile world cracks before them.

There is no time to do it. Sylvain is assigned to a unit, and the haste with which everyone moves leaves no room to go against the purposeful flow of the soldiers marching for their respective strongholds. He sees a spot of dark hair, tied tightly up, and he calls out Felix's name, waving for his attention. But Felix gets lost among the shifting crowd, and the people Sylvain is to fight alongside give him less-than-subtle looks to hurry and lead their advance.

His stomach drops like he's fallen from a great height. But he shakes his head, ignoring it, charging his men and women into action.

His lance is soon mangled with innards and drenched in blood from too many. The stench of it, coppery and visceral, sticks to his skin and hair; even Beauty, bred as he is for war, is filthy and whinnies in distress. He kills and he kills, these people nameless by their helmets, fodder for whatever Edelgard is planning. Fodder they are, truly – the wave of Adrestians is endless. Down the gentle slope of the hill he is stationed in he sees them, synchronized in their marching, the line like a serpent come to swallow them all. Sylvain's breath is forceful, manic from the effort of continuously fighting, and the sight of the Empire's might quickens it.

_Can we _win_?_ he thinks. Thinks, and does not say, because if he shows his fear there is no hope for those under his command. The whoosh of steel through air, and he swipes away an arrow a blink away from piercing him. In response, he kicks Beauty forward, jabbing the offending archer, hearing their dying gurgle as his lance goes through their gut like butter, their dribbling entrails so easily freed. This, too, could happen to Sylvain.

_I don't want to die_, he thinks, fascinated and sickened by the red gleam of his lance. _Not here, not like this_.

Where is Professor Byleth? Lady Rhea? Anyone, an adult, someone who has lived longer than his nineteen years and who knows what they're doing, who can tell him all will be alright because he is beginning to believe this is where everything comes apart.

Where is _Felix_?

"Fall back!"

He picks his head up. One of their own, a messenger, is returning from the very front line, horse kicking up dust that briefly obscures the approaching enemy, making it easy – and foolish – for Sylvain to deceive himself into thinking he'd imagined this was worsening. But the cloud dissipates as the horse runs to the sanctuary of the monastery, because it must retain its divine protection even in this.

"Cavalry fall back!" the messenger repeats, shouting himself hoarse to be heard above the screams of the dying and victorious alike.

Units became less orderly when battles began as it became obvious it was comprised of frightened individuals securing their own lives. Now, though, the disorder is magnificent, as soldiers rush for the monastery, the worst confirmed.

With one last worried look at the town below overtaken by the Adrestians, Sylvain turns around. He'll find Felix, he tells himself, and say something to him. Anything.

He searches, heart thumping in his mouth, finding only the fallen – from both sides – littering the grounds.

The distant ring of steel on steel flits from around a corner. Sylvain makes Beauty run to the sound, prepared to help whoever it is, but when he sees it is Felix fighting there is no hesitation in the downward strike of his lance through the Adrestian's throat.

"I had it under control!" Felix says, himself even in this situation. "Why are you here? Weren't you outside the monastery?"

Sylvain could laugh or cry or both. He flicks his weapon out, blood splatter on the grass and his face. "We were told to fall back." He purses his mouth. "Things aren't looking good, Felix."

He clicks his tongue. "Where's that boar when you need him?"

"At the front line."

"And we're still struggling?"

"The Adrestians... I saw their advance. There's so many of them. For every one I killed, three more took their place."

Felix turns his eyes up to his, and besides his usual disdain, there is something uneasy lurking in them. "You saw the corpses. It's bad here, too. I think–" He exhales, running a hand through the mess of his hair. When he drops his arm, red is smeared along his temple. "I think Garreg Mach is going to fall."

Though he agrees, hearing it twists Sylvain's stomach. Students who could not fight had already been evacuated. What could those who had made a stand do when they were staggering on their feet?

"I will protect those who need it," Felix continues, "but I will not die in pursuit of a futile glory. Were your only orders to fall back here?"

"Yes–"

Heavy feet approach. They each take a stance – but it is Dedue, clanging in his armor, as sweaty and bloody as them.

"Sylvain, Felix!" he yells. "His Highness bids you to flee! The monastery will not last. Run, to Faerghus! Before the Empire attacks the Kingdom as well!"

Sylvain is stunned. "What about _him_?"

"He and I will hold here as long as we can. But your families will have need of you in protecting Faerghus. Run, and that is a royal order!"

"We _all_ need to run!" Felix says, with a real anger that stuns Sylvain further. "He's the damned leader! What good is a dead king?"

"He will not die here."

"You just said the monastery will fall! If you stay behind, all you and he will do is get yourselves a footnote in a history book!"

"With me there, he will not die." Dedue's eyes steel over. "Find the others. Pass the message on; I must return to battle. It is His Highness's will. Obey." He runs, back to the slaughter.

Sylvain grips his lance, looking to Felix. "You heard."

"That blind devotion will get him killed," Felix says, jaw set. "Both of them."

"We just have to believe in them," Sylvain says, as if lying out loud makes it less delusional. "Let's get the others before _they_ pointlessly die."

Felix isn't fully convinced, but he grudgingly climbs atop Sylvain's horse, one hand holding on to Sylvain while the other wields his sword. Though it isn't needed, and neither is Sylvain's lance, as there are no breathing Adrestians remaining. They gallop past the dead, scouring supplies when they can for the trek to Faerghus.

It takes time, but they find everyone alive. Securing supplies is more difficult yet, with storehouses destroyed or already ransacked, but they are able to pack enough onto the scant horses left alive.

At the base of the monastery Sylvain risks a look back. The setting sun burns like the fire blazing through the town. A dragon's roar, the thrumming of magic. Overlapping screams. But whose?

"Sylvain," Felix says, lowly, not in ire but a worried warning.

"Sorry," he mumbles, turning around to find his peers' eyes on him. Without Dimitri, it is he who is the closest thing they have to a leader. Understanding their need of such a person, of a confident and assuring face, he nods at them, though he does not want the role. "To Faerghus!"

They flee.


	2. pull

The bitter seeds of unrest have born fruition to war. The land is not truly marked by the boundaries the nations have made for themselves; these are observed by tradition only, tradition the Empire blows away like sand. At a gentle slope away from one's feet might begin, quite benignly, the border of a nation denounced as one for_ the enemy_. Where lowborn and highborn, northerners and southerners, lived together at the monastery, all flee to their respective homes to heed the banners raised on the ground they once tread. Blood, it seemed, was relentless; that which coursed through their veins, that which demanded be spilled by those who did not have the right kind.

War has sharply sunk its teeth even this far north in the Gautier lands. They fend off attacks on two fronts: the Empire creeping like a plague from the south, and the Sreng in the north taking advantage of the established chaos. They fight until they are sore, callused, tired. Sylvain has never been staunch in his faith, but before he nightly collapses into an imitation of sleep, he offers the Goddess a simple prayer in the sacred solitude of his own mind: _Keep everyone safe_. Surely, as they bleed for the Church, she can do this much.

He prays for them because for five years Sylvain does not see anyone but those sworn to his house or those he's sworn to kill.

It should not have been so. The Faerghus nobles should have cooperated and fought as they could without their leader, their Prince-turned-King captured and sentenced to die. But the Empire had arrived. Everything fell apart with the pillar of the Kingdom toppled, and those who had in turn supported him scrambled to protect the land in his stead. Or they capitulated. Deprived of their King, the tenuous trust held between the nobles had frayed to nothing. Even friends of old could not communicate in fear of enemy interception along the vast emptiness separating the Kingdom's domains; or that by the time a message reached its destination, the receiver would no longer be a friend. There was no time for these frivolities during war. Simply survival.

For five years Sylvain simmers on his lonesome. The friends he'd grown up with, reliable presences for years, are reduced to memories. To hopes they remain alive.

Fleeing from Garreg Mach, the Blue Lions had journeyed together until reaching Faerghus, where each had parted for their own lands to aid their families. One by one the group had diminished, their partings brimming with the promise they'd made to meet again. Last to leave had been Felix, as the Fraldarius territory was to the south of the northernmost Gautiers'. The two of them, friends for years, and all Sylvain had been able to muster as a goodbye was _Don't die_.

"Neither must you," Felix had said, off just like that.

Sylvain didn't think so much time would pass in between the life he knew once and what he was thrown into. A month without news of anyone became three became six became nine became a year, and another yet, stacking like cards with empty faces. But the soldiers gossip, telling what a friend of a friend of a friend had overheard, and this is how Sylvain knows, at the very least, that he has not lived while Felix died.

He worries for his other friends, of course. But it is Felix, so close to him yet a lifetime away, that his thoughts unfailingly return to in day as in night. Is the winter any less harsh there? Does he inspire his people as his father?

Is he lonely?

The cold in the north is the kind that kills the ill-prepared. Sylvain is swaddled in layers, snow feathering down. The sky and earth are white, seamless where they touch in the horizon; were it not for the snow, up and down would be indistinguishable from one another. It's like being inside of a porcelain bowl. He feels just as trapped. But he cannot leave to pursue his selfish wish of seeing his friends. He has a duty here. He hears the Felix in his head spit the word with an eye-roll, and it hurts less to think of it like that. He has a duty, and he cannot risk his life or Felix's for a frivolous meeting. The Gautier lands, as the Fraldarius', need to be defended by those who know how to do it best.

The snow makes mountains of itself, ever as it has, with no thoughts to guide the maddening flurries; it just comes, increasingly with winter's advent.

The Ethereal Moon will descend soon. At night, the moon that this time is named for is suspended like a stubborn, large snowflake. On this day, it is full. Full as it had been five years ago, with a promise made, holy in the monastery it was spoken, to meet again.

Sylvain and the others had believed it then; it was easy to say words like that because the prospect of five years was an eternity, and because the troubles that sometimes arose across the continent didn't impact them.

He lets out air through his nose in what could pass for a laugh or a scoff, depending on any listener's inclination. Himself, he finds truth in them both.

He _wants_ to keep the promise. Wouldn't the rest of them?

He does not speak of his wish aloud, hoping that by the promised date this whimsy has faded.

On a day only a breath less cold than the nights, the camp hums with a hushed excitement that brings life to the soldiers' pallid faces, to the monochrome of their attire and surroundings in perpetual whiteness of perpetual snow. Sylvain hears snippets of it as he goes to break his fast: a murderous beast who hunkers down at the ruins of Garreg Mach, unwashed and one-eyed and furred. Nothing human, he thinks at first, until the strategy meeting.

It is said the beast is a man bearing resemblance to the fallen King.

It is but a rumor, and one so wild none of them can consider it beyond a shallow acknowledgment. The King was dead at the Empire's hands – otherwise he would have returned to his people, wouldn't he? And he could have never become such a madman. Could he?

But he'd been imprisoned. He'd lost everything once and been swept once more in the deepness of that loss with the foundations of his life destroyed by Edelgard. Under those circumstances, who wouldn't fall?

Sylvain's offer to investigate the claim is out of his mouth before he is aware he's making it, but when he realizes he has done so, he has no regrets. He offers it from a genuine wish to find Dimitri. But the coincidence of the reunion's date is not lost on him. Privately, he hopes the rest of the Blue Lions hear the winds of this rumor, and that they too will run to it.

Promises couldn't be so cheap. And, perhaps, in this time of war, a single chance to meet those he loves is what he most needs. 

* * *

The snow melts and the land is dried brown rather than dusted white as Sylvain and his troops journey south. Winter's hold is not the same through all of Fódlan; it is less cold and desolate the further they travel, and Sylvain is surprised at himself for this surprise – had he forgotten Garreg Mach's mild winters so easily? But war has affected all regions the same: abandoned villages, thievery, bodies jutting from the earth in differing states of decay.

It hurts to see. After all they have endured, they have not been able to keep everyone safe. Foolish of him to think they could. And yet.

They travel. Hills flatten, trees retain their leaves, the river they follow courses liquidly. The south, in its warmer climes. It's a bit uncomfortable to be back in it after five years of northern Faerghus' ruthlessness. He'd already shed off a few layers of furs, but the odd warmth will not fade. It is even joined by a pulse fast at his neck.

_That's not from the climate, is it?_ he thinks, a bud of a smile defying the absence of spring.

His friends. The closer they dawn to Garreg Mach, the more Sylvain is certain they will be there. And, if it truly is Dimitri haunting the monastery's ruins, this war's tides may swell in their favor.

He and his troops do encounter trouble on the road. Nothing they cannot prevail against, but it detracts from their timely arrival. He worries they will get there too late, and those worries increase as the reunion's date approaches yet the crags of mountains do not end; they have not seemed to change at all since they had begun crossing the range where the monastery is nestled.

They round their current mountain pass, and the broken spires of the monastery point to the heavens like the mangled fingers of a rock giant.

His spirit soars as high as those spires. He turns his head over his shoulder, grinning. "Press on!" he yells, and the orders are carried back by word-of-mouth through the group. As Sylvain speeds up his horse, the rest of them follow, the clamor and dusty clouds heralding them with no discretion. But let any who are present see. He's here.

First they must pass through the town at the foot of the monastery. As they wind in, they hear the sounds of a skirmish. A yell, somehow familiar despite the rage in it.

Thieves run off or lay dead or fight against two figures: one clad in the furs of the north, blond hair grown long and dirty; another the same reticent person who'd taught them all five years past. There is no doubt the first is Dimitri, but to see the Professor here – who could divine the Goddess' caprice?

They are not the only familiar faces Sylvain sees. In the distance are Ashe and Annette and Mercedes, wielding weapons and magic they could not have handled five years ago. The urge to call out to them is strong, but they have their fights to focus on.

"We're helping them get rid of these thieves," Sylvain says. "Move on!"

"Count us in!"

He turns.

Ingrid – hair shorter, in gleaming armor – leads her own small group of mounted soldiers.

"Ingrid!" he says, laughing in delight. They're nearly all here, missing simply Dedue and–

"Damn. Am I the last to get here?" says a voice who Sylvain spins around so fast to see it nauseates him, but upon seeing him – sliding off a horse with mild disgust, hand reaching for the hilt of his sword as he looks to the other two – there is nothing in his chest except his heart beating a thousand times per minute.

His hair is shorter, styled differently, swept bangs streaming to his eyebrows. His face is more gaunt, his eyes sharper, his lip drawn tighter – but it is Felix, not five feet away after five years apart.

Sylvain, speechless, grin hurting his face, is saved from having to say anything when Felix speaks first.

"We'll catch up later," he says, unsheathing his sword, running to join the fight.

They all have come from across the Kingdom united by no purpose other than a promise, but their old days spent as a unit serve them well. They remember how to fight when they are one another's allies, needing little direction for their newly presumed roles, and in their reunited might they quickly defeat the thieves.

They gather without being told to, exchanging enthusiastic greetings and embraces and hasty catch-ups that will certainly be elaborated on later, safe inside the monastery. Sylvain makes a move for Felix, hoping the cheer in the air has affected even him and that after five years without seeing a once-constant presence in his life he will allow Sylvain a hug. But Felix, arms crossed and lips pursed, nimbly dodges him.

"Felix!" he says, meaning it as a protest, but his laugh overtakes his complaint. "Don't be like that!"

"_You_ don't be like that. You're seeing that I'm fine, aren't you? Is that not enough?"

"No," he blurts, and Felix blinks, arms slackening.

They're interrupted by the informal group talk out here, with the wind forlorn through the once-thriving town, and the setting sun that had closed their school days a burnished copper melancholy. They are together once more, but not complete: Dedue's life has been lost so Dimitri may have lived – at the news, Sylvain thinks he hears a sneered _tsk_ from Felix – and despite the rest of them being present, they are not who they used to be. Dimitri most of all.

Outside is no place for this discussion, though, and they walk to the monastery. Sylvain returns to Felix's side.

"Your hair!" he says, with a disbelieving laugh. He again moves to touch it as Felix again evades him. Once he'd suggested Felix wear it down – once, in a time Sylvain puts aside for now – and instead, he'd chopped it. "How did it get like that?"

"Sorry for not having the time to make myself presentable during a war," Felix dryly replies.

"Why do you wear two swords now? Do you fight with one in each hand?"

Felix's hand protectively goes to their hilts. "No. What if one broke?"

He laughs. "One of your blades? Unlikely."

"Well," Felix says, standing a little taller, "you never know when you might need two."

"It does look intimidating."

Felix seems content at hearing that. "Exactly."

Sylvain laughs again. _He can be pretty simple_.

Felix crosses his arms, a tiny line forming between his eyebrows. "Can you afford to be here? I'd heard the Gautiers were fighting the Sreng in addition to the Adrestians."

"My father has more war experience than me. He and his soldiers will be fine." He smiles. "Even so, I was coming down here no matter what. Something told me the promised Blue Lions reunion was going to be fulfilled." He waggles his eyebrows, nudging Felix, smile wider. "Were you worried about me?"

"No," Felix says, and Sylvain's smile feels like tar, plastered on his face. But then he adds, turning his face away, "Because I never doubted your skill or will to live."

The tar sloughs off. "Felix, I could hug you."

"Don't," he says, speeding ahead.

"Too late!" Sylvain throws his arms around him from the back, getting a yelp from Felix, whose arms squirm under Sylvain's tight hold. "It's been five years since I saw you, come on!"

In retaliation, Felix throws his head back to hit Sylvain. The crown of his hair comes to Sylvain's nose, and the nostalgic scent of it overwhelms him. Leather and oil. With it, a softness that had flowed through his fingers. Closed-off lips on a closed-off person he'd–

In his reverie, his hold had slackened, and Felix has freed himself, wiping at his upper sleeves as if sullied by dirt. "You're the same," he mumbles, taking his leave.

It might have been better that he'd left. Sylvain's mind had begun drifting into a memory he'd long secluded. Dismissed as rose-tinted from simpler, younger days. There is no pretending now that he has carried that single time in his room with Felix with greater weight than what was proper.

_Had_ he ever really pretended? These five years, what other name had he so whispered to the Goddess or to himself at his most desperate lonesome? In what direction did he most glance to when hope of victory was nearly extinguished?

He runs a hand through his hair. _We're at war_._ I can think about this later_.

Inside the monastery, they all convene for a meal. It is almost as if the five years of absence had never existed. All of them, grown and changed, are returned to their banter, the camaraderie of their school days. Only almost, because Dedue had sacrificed himself for their King. Only almost because that very King, ragged and fierce, has grown to the beast that lurked in the depths of his wounded soul. A beast no amount of laughter or catch-up stories can ignore or subdue. In silence, their King glowers, snapping at any who question him, even the Professor whom he'd so admired.

Where once the worry of war went unspoken in their eyes, now it is that the man they are fighting for is not the man they'd hoped he would be. After their meal, Felix confides as much to Sylvain.

"I always knew he was a beast," he says, mouth twisted aside, "but I never thought that he'd embrace it like that."

"He was already carrying a lot of pain," Sylvain says. "His imprisonment and Dedue's death were his limit. I can understand." He sighs. "I don't like how he is right now any more than the rest of us, but he's alive, at least. You can't help a corpse. And I mean to help him get to a better place."

Sylvain does not like the way Felix looks at him one bit.

As he's about to ask what it means, Felix says, "Let's spar."

He manages a smile. "Already?"

"Are you afraid you've dulled these last five years? Yes or no, Sylvain."

"Yes, yes," he says. "To the spar. I've not dulled. You said yourself, we've been fighting the Adrestians and the Sreng." He shrugs exaggeratedly. "Who knows, maybe I'm a better swordsman than you by now."

"Absolutely not. I've not been slacking, either." He smirks. "Prepare to lose again."

'Again.' They'd been through this before. Five years ago, on the night of the ball, the night after their house's very promise to meet again. Felix had been spun from the moonlight, then woven Sylvain into it, into an exquisite loss.

And this is the same grand monastery that had housed that spar, but the years have decayed it. Between gaps of broken stone comes the late sun's light, motes of dust aglow. It would be beautiful if it were not for the ruinous reason the light sneaks in golden slabs.

"I won't lose," Sylvain says, the empty halls reverberating his words.

The training ground had been ransacked of real weapons, but the wooden practice ones remain, some in better states than others. They'd been playing at soldiers then. The feeling of a real steel weapon on their hands was by now a necessity, ingrained into them as innately as the need to breathe. That after what they have pierced through and seen and experienced they return to these playthings draws a small, dry laugh from Sylvain.

Felix does not comment on it. _He's probably thinking the same thing._

They each grab a sword. Sylvain has barely turned around when Felix lunges at him, sword aimed for where his heart is; he blocks it in time with a surprised shout, striking the sword away when he grips it two-handed.

"You didn't warn me!" he gripes, scampering away from the armory wall, making open space behind him as to not be cornered.

"Neither will your enemies," Felix says, coming at him with an overhead swing.

Sylvain is taller, and once it would have been an easy block. But Felix had not lied – he's faster, more agile and powerful. Sylvain has to bend back to block it an inch from his neck, splinters of wood puffing off from the forceful contact. His sword is on the inside, and he uses this to his advantage, scraping down the oaken blade and shaving it thinner as he jabs down to Felix's chest.

But he, too, is kept from striking as Felix smacks the sword away before it can reach him, no longer any pressure in the parry. With his momentum he attacks, sword close to his body as he half-throws himself to Sylvain so the wood may meet his neck at a distance intimate as a kiss.

The unexpected proximity delays Sylvain's reaction. He blocks Felix with his own sword flat to his chest, arms shaking from the effort of holding it back with all of Felix's weight exerted on it, his body almost flush with Sylvain's if it weren't for the very swords that draw them together keeping them insignificantly apart; his breathing is uneven, loud, or is that Felix's, or is it both of them because Felix shakes too, and he's looking up – at Sylvain's lips, probably thinking Sylvain won't notice but he does, of course he does, with a longing that creaks inside of him to the point of breaking like old wood. Like the swords, fracturing now, their age, disuse, and sudden force too much for them. Felix is thrown off-balance, but he's right there in front of Sylvain, who catches him as their broken swords clatter to the ground. His hands are on Felix's forearms as steadily as they'd been on his sword, and Felix too holds on to his elbows for support – he'd darted his hands out without thinking, but he does not let go now that he has been righted.

"Felix? Sylvain? Are you here? We're having a strategy meeting–" starts a voice, immediately cutting itself off with a squeak.

Sylvain and Felix jump away as if each has maimed the other.

Annette is at the decayed door, a hand to her mouth. "Sorry, was I interr–?"

"_No_," Felix says, heading for the door.

Sylvain and Annette watch him go. She then turns to him, giving him a questioning look.

"We were sword fighting with the monastery's old wood swords," he explains, much more carefree than the pummeling his heart does to his rib cage warrants. "They broke, he fell, I caught him." He shrugs, managing a smile that means nothing. "Who would have thought five year old weapons made of something that rots would rot?"

But the smile tricks her, and she chuckles. "You're silly, the both of you, for sparring so soon."

"Well," he says, and how could this smile possibly be believable, "you know Felix. Walk me to the meeting, since he ditched me?"

"Sure! I didn't say where the meeting is, so I don't know where Felix thinks he's going."

"If he gets lost, he deserves it."

"Oh," she says, smiling, "you don't mean that."

He smiles back, knowing she's right. "He wouldn't let me hug him, can you believe that? I had to surprise him with it, but it wasn't a proper hug."

"He wouldn't let anyone. Don't worry about it too much."

"Yeah," he says, to end the conversation. At his core, the worry churns. 

* * *

Sylvain can't sleep.

It isn't because the dormitories are even less comfortable after five years of deterioration meagerly fixed by the supplies they'd brought. Neither is it for the wind that whispers through cracks in the wall. Nor for the hard-fought battle that had already erupted, the Empire baring its teeth as the Kingdom has. Not even for that, despite their reunion, he has not seen much of Felix as he would like – there are battles to prepare for, to strategize about, to go out and fight.

It is a person's voice seeping through the stones, pleading and demanding.

He gets out of bed and follows the sound to the corner. Dimitri gesticulates madly as if the torches along the wall burn him where their light falls on him. He is arguing with their shadows.

"–what I am _doing_, Father!"

Sylvain purses his mouth. Not the shadows, then. Ghosts.

"Has their blood been rich enough? Does it nourish you? I will send you the reddest blood of all soon–"

Sylvain steps out from the corner. "Dimitri," he says, assertive enough he is heard, but softly enough Dimitri will not think this a reprimand, "you couldn't sleep, either?"

This is a person who will not be sweetened by his words. No one has been able to talk to Dimitri as they'd been able to once, though not for lack of trying. They'd changed their approach to him, if they approached at all, speaking with the kindness displayed to a wild animal to be tamed.

Dimitri is no fool to it. "I have not been able to sleep for the last five years. Why do you ask questions you know the answers to?" He curls his lip back. "Have you come to try and bring me _peace _with _words_? Do you honestly believe that will work?"

Sylvain's lip turns down. "When you talk yourself down like that, it convinces you the words are real."

"Because they are. Spare me your platitudes, Sylvain. And that look of pity. I have not lost both my eyes; I am not blind to how all of you now see me." He makes a fist, leather squeaking from the effort. "The thing you see before you is your new reality. Do not try to defy that."

He takes a slow step closer to him. "I can't accept it as reality, Dimitri. Who were you talking to?"

"The dead. Their bodies may slumber beneath the earth but their voices have remained within me."

"Do you think," he very carefully says, "you could talk to us, too? The living?"

"It is _you_ who never listen!" Dimitri jabs his chest, his single eye fixed on him like the tip of his lance. "The dead demand their revenge while the living presume they know better. I must heed those who are in the right, and it is none of you!"

Sylvain moves his finger away, the hurt in his chest as true as if he had been wounded. "Dimitri–"

"What," says a voice behind Sylvain colder than the Faerghus snows, "is going on here?"

Felix is at a good distance from them, but his voice had carried far in this desolate hall. He does not move from where he stands, half-hidden by the shadows.

"I was trying to talk to His Highness," Sylvain says, and turns back to Dimitri – who blusters away. He sighs.

"Don't tell me," Felix says, a single ember in the frigidity of his voice, "you were going to try to make him feel better."

Sylvain frowns. "I thought I'd try. Doesn't it bother you seeing him like this? I know you condemned him before for hiding his bloodlust, but you can't possibly be happy you were proven way too right."

"And so you thought you'd be the one who'd take care of him to change him back?"

"Felix," Sylvain says after a pause, his head buzzing with a sound that would overtake the night if it escaped his head, "did you think I was trying to seduce our King back to normalcy?"

His glare could rival his blade. "Wasn't that your solution to all your problems?"

Sylvain's laugh is cynical. "No, it wasn't. Did you think I spent the last five years sleeping around? We're at war."

"So you were on the battlefield every given moment? You never had a moment to rest and return to your debauchery?"

He had found respite. It was rare, but it had happened. And there _had_ been a few women – but very few; a single hand could count them and have fingers left over – that he had forgotten about until Felix brings it up. Mostly, on those empty nights, it had been himself and this very face now sneering at him that had pressed onto his mind.

"Why are you being so– so suddenly aggressive?" Sylvain asks instead, hoping the torchlight conceals the warmth he feels on his cheeks. He asks it and a possibility rises to his mind that, in his own fluster, he does not smother. "Are you jealous?"

"_Jealous_?" Felix splutters, taking a step back. "You think I– me– I'm _jealous_, that's what you think?" He coughs, or scoffs, or laughs; it's an odd sound he hacks out, and it's the last thing he says before twisting around, presumably returning to his quarters.

Sylvain had thought – hoped – that after five years of absence from each other's lives, their friendship would be made stronger.

Hope, it seems, is as fickle as prayer. 

* * *

Sylvain rises with the sun and heads for the repaired stables, the thought of breakfast sickening. There is comfort in brushing the horses, in changing their feed; he supposes it's not unlike the quiet contentment Felix gets from his swords' upkeep–

The brush drops out of his hand. Keeping from seeing Felix in person was easy enough in a place as large as Garreg Mach. But he carries his thoughts wherever he goes, and they are merciless in their fixation.

He lets out a long breath, though it does not ease the tension in him.

"That's not Beauty."

He straightens.

Hay, scattered on the cold and stiff earth, crunches as Felix's footsteps get closer. He stops in front of the opposing enclosure, hands cupping his elbows.

Sylvain's avoidance of Felix had been for his sake as much as his own. If Felix is the one who first treads them back to something like an apology, Sylvain does not mind. But he cannot be so eager so obviously; he does not actually know what Felix is here to do.

He turns back to the stallion, brushing his flank. "He's not, yeah. I retired him. But you remember Beauty?"

"With a name like that, who wouldn't?"

Sylvain can't help a smile.

"Who's this one?" Felix asks.

"He doesn't have a name yet. I just kind of grabbed the first horse I could before leaving our territory – yes, it was reckless; don't give me that look, I know – but he's a great horse, too." He hangs up the brush. "I meant to go on a short ride, if you want to come."

"I suppose that would be fine," Felix says, raising a shoulder in a shrug, glancing away.

His smile is wider. He leads the horse out of the enclosure, Felix joining him.

Suddenly Sylvain realizes that if Felix wants to talk, being on a horse while he walked would not appear well-intentioned.

Out on the grounds, he pats the horse. "Do you mind riding double?"

"Are you asking me," Felix warily says, "or the horse?"

He laughs. "You. He'll like you, I promise. I know horseback riding isn't your thing but he might convince you."

He hears Felix huff. "It's not my fault horses don't usually like me."

_No, it kind of very much is_. But he can't say something like that right now, when they're precarious on reconciliation. "If something goes wrong for some reason, I'm here. Don't worry."

"I'm not worrying," Felix insists, grabbing the horse's reins and pulling himself up without Sylvain's help.

Chuckling to himself, Sylvain hops on after. He'd not saddled the horse – for short walks, it was humbling to feel the power in the animal as it trotted – and with Felix in front of him, his usual skill in bareback riding falters. He shifts on the horse, finding his center of gravity as it is with more weight with him and from keeping a moderate distance behind Felix.

Felix cranes his head over his shoulder. "What are you doing? Weren't you the master equestrian?" He's smirking.

"I'm adjusting!" He grabs the horse's reins. "Alright, I'm good. Here we go." With his boot he nudges the horse forward. At a steady canter they go, out of the grounds, to the rest of the monastery.

"Should you really be doing that?" Felix asks.

"The place is empty. I'm not going to be disturbing any lectures. Besides, I'm sure even the horses get bored of just going around the grounds."

"Hmm."

The steady patter of the horse's hooves across grass and dirt and stone briefly lull Sylvain's attention away from what is unsaid but wanting to be freed.

"I was rude to you yesterday," Felix says to the air in front of him.

Sylvain looks to Felix's tuft of hair. How it swishes, and how it's no longer the length or bun Sylvain was fond of. It distracts him.

"It was wrong and out of place," Felix continues. "I am– I'm sorry for what I said. You were right to yell at me as you did."

This is more polite than his usual apologies. Maybe because he's not looking at him as he makes it._ H__e does dislike eye contact_. Sylvain smiles. Felix cannot see it, but it doesn't matter. It's a genuine reaction, and one that will be heard as much as it could be seen. "I accept your apology."

Felix hums again, and Sylvain isn't sure what to make of it until he remembers what he'd shot out in his own ire. An accusation of jealousy, that ugly little thing, that Felix had derided him for – but he'd neither refuted nor acknowledged it; he'd simply flustered. And in Sylvain's long friendship with him, in coming to know his tells, he knows what that had meant: that he'd been right. Felix is jealous. But is it over what he'd thought Sylvain's five years had been like? That he thought he was offering Dimitri himself?

Why would he be jealous at all?

"I'll be nice to you if you're nice to me," Sylvain ends up saying, his smile less real.

Felix harrumphs.

This isn't a good end to the conversation. But he has nothing else to say. Nothing that will not shatter what they've just mended, at least. His arms hover around Felix to keep the reins pulled toward him while not touching Felix out of courtesy. His arms have not tired; he has built up endurance in the proof of his muscles that hold up his lance, and yet he has the urge to rest them against Felix, to lean in to him just a bit. If he does this, something in him will be settled; he feels it. If he does this, he'll have no excuse for it, and Felix will demand red-faced to know his intent, but he doesn't know it himself.

It is Felix who leans back against him. Plopping, more like, from the weight of his northern swordsman attire. His hair tuft tickles Sylvain's nose. Leather and oil.

"You were right," he says.

"Hmm?" Sylvain replies, lost in this, confused in why Felix has been the one to close the distance not once but twice. Confused, most of all, in why he likes it.

"This horse isn't bad. Name it already."

Should he speak, his mouth will flit over Felix's hair.

He speaks.

"You should name him."

"Me?" Felix asks, twisting his head around. He's very, very close. Should Sylvain speak now, it will be his temple his lips brush.

He does not speak. Just nods.

_Coward_, he thinks, unbidden, hold tightening on the reins.

The chance passes for good when Felix faces forward again. "I don't know."

"Interesting name," Sylvain jokes halfheartedly. It gets him an elbow to the ribs.

"I've only named my swords, not a living creature. He's yours, anyway. You name him."

"You've named your swords?" he asks, unable to keep a laugh away.

"Yes, what of it?!"

"Nothing. It seems kind of sentimental for you." He tugs lightly on the reins, and the horse circles back to the stables.

"I'm not heartless," Felix says, a little quiet.

Sylvain's chest pangs. "Yeah, you're not. Sorry."

Outside the stables he stops the horse, hops off, and offers Felix a hand out of habit of the times he'd ridden double. Felix takes it, all of his strength in a grasp, graceful as he slides off. His boots are flat to the floor and he holds on to Sylvain's hand for a moment too long before dropping his arm to his side, clutching it by the elbow.

Felix walks with Sylvain as he leads the horse to his enclosure, a pleasantness between them belying the hand-shaped burn mark searing Sylvain's glove.

"You didn't give me a name," Sylvain says when the horse is in its enclosure.

"You were serious about it?"

"Yes." He bows low, sweeping his arm to the horse. "Do the honors, if you would so please, oh future Duke Fraldarius."

"I already told you, I don't know."

Sylvain peeks up at him, grinning. "You were serious about 'I Don't Know'?"

"Sylvain!"

"It's done, then! My stallion is I Don't Know."

"You have the sense of humor of a child." He tries to chide him, but his eyes are crinkled from a mouth that refuses to give in and quirk up.

"Maybe, but can you complain when every time I ride, I'll think of you?"

Felix's eyebrows go up; the smallest sliver of space appears between his parted lips.

Sylvain, too, drops open his mouth in self-disbelief he has said this. Quickly, he finds something else to say, however inane. "So, um, that's that." His laugh is fake, and he hates that it is Felix who is hearing it; Felix should never have to see the glittering falsities he's made for himself. "I'm sure I'll be the talk of the cavalry again. The enemy's, even."

Felix, composing himself, puts a hand to his hip, casting his head aside. "Whatever."

"I'm hungry," Sylvain says, going outside, Felix trailing after. "Have you had breakfast? What's today's fare?"

"I don't know. I haven't eaten yet, either."

Sylvain turns to him. So the first thing Felix had done was find him to apologize. "Come with me?" he asks.

"Fine," Felix sighs with much affectation. That tiny smile would go unnoticed by other eyes, but Sylvain knows what to look for. It has been before him in life as in dreams, and the sight of it is as rare as it is wonderful. Five years without it and it's like Sylvain had been breathing wrong until now.

This is what it's like to be in love. Isn't it?

* * *

He has a name for the twist and stutter his heart does just thinking of Felix. And he hoards it – not for the treasure it is, but for the consequences of its spoken existence.

They are southbound to meet Duke Fraldarius. The landscape changes. Life clings to being on craggy mountains, a testament to the tenacity of survival. The wild animals avoid them, skittering as they do in any human presence, but perhaps that their army reeks of blood they've shed and pursue steers them away.

They make camp in a valley husked to nothing. Almost nothing. Off exploring with the last of the sunlight remaining to the day, Sylvain comes upon a crook in one of the mountains that dips to a narrow, verdant vale defying the cold of this Moon in spring early come. Wildflowers and grass sprout up between the nakedness of the mountains, the contrast of life and death hidden away where Sylvain had to go find it.

_I have to show Felix_, he thinks, and goes to get him.

Felix barely grumbles when Sylvain tells him his little discovery or that he wants him to come along. Which he does.

"There," Sylvain says, pointing to the break in the mountain's face. It isn't wide enough to fit them side by side, and so while Felix steps close to it to see, he steps back, waiting for Felix's reaction.

He doesn't really have one. "It's nice."

"'Nice'? We've been surrounded by nothing but rock, and here is this spot where something good is thriving in winter and in war, but you just think it's 'nice'?"

He steps back, but does not face Sylvain. "It seems frivolous to want something good when everything is terrible."

He feels his expression set. "It's exactly because everything is terrible that we need things like this." Sylvain goes up to the nook, splashes of color among grass. "If we allowed only the bad to rule us, we would..." He doesn't finish the sentence, unable to as he realizes how it would end, but Felix picks up on it.

"We'd be like the boar." Felix leans back against the rock. "It's him who needs to see this more than me."

A hint of a sad smile. "I don't know that he'd appreciate it right now. The one who I wanted to show was you, anyway."

"Why?"

"Why not?" He studies the gap in the rock and begins to take off his armor, to Felix's consternation.

"What are you doing?!"

"I want to go in there, but with my armor, I won't fit."

"Don't take it off! I'll go." Felix, slimmer in figure and without the bulk of a cavalryman's armor, hops through the crook. "What do you want from here? Don't tell me it's a flower."

He grins: at Felix doing this without thinking, at his correct guess. "One of the red ones."

Felix rolls his eyes and scoffs, but despite it he picks a flower with more care than Sylvain had expected. He hops out, standing awkwardly in front of Sylvain, the flower held at his side. "Here," he says after a moment, handing it over without looking at him.

"Thank you." Sylvain takes it. "It's for you." And he hands it right back, noting how Felix is approaching a color similar to the flower.

"What are you _doing_?!"

Oh, he knows _what_ he is doing, but _why_ he is doing this when he knows full well how Felix will take it and how it makes himself look? Only the Goddess knows. "Giving you a pretty flower." His hands remain around Felix's, whose eyes dart everywhere but Sylvain's own. "It may not last forever, but it will have existed."

Felix steals his hands back, flower and all, like he's been burned. "Ugh," he says, briskly leaving.

"My horse will remind me of you, and that flower will remind you of me!" Sylvain calls out after him, digging the hole deeper – surely Felix can see what he is doing, to answer his own question.

Felix doesn't reply. Maybe because he is too far, maybe because he heard and doesn't want to. Maybe, most likely, because he doesn't see.

In the morning the trek to the Valley of Torment is resumed. Sylvain goes to his place in the line, Felix to his. The land dries up as if fire has scorched the whole of it down to the rock beneath the earth. And then the fire is visible in languid flames, in molten rock dribbling down hellish rivers. Heat oppresses like a living thing. Sylvain sweats inside his armor and first fights his own mind for levelheadedness.

_How is Felix? _he wonders. Not just for the heat none of the Faerghus army is accustomed to, but that they are here to join forces with his father.

And then the enemy intercepts them. Former allies turned traitors – to save themselves from the Empire's fury. To fulfill the knight's creed of serving their liege, regardless of who they may be.

Later, Sylvain hears tales of Felix's swords, both used at once, striking like the talons of a bird of prey in a merciless bloodbath – and all the while, a flower held steadfast wound around the metal chain of his hood.

With the Duke's arrival, morale rises, and dinnertime is livelier by the addition of many men who have come with their prodigious leader. In mostly drunken conversations, victory is spoken of for a certainty. It is too early for such confidence, Sylvain thinks, but he keeps this to himself. This is many's hope and he will not be the one to snuff it out.

Sitting at a makeshift table with strangers and Felix, he tries to go along with the joviality. He grabs his flagon of mead, looking at his own wavering amber reflection. "Have you ever thought about what you'll do after the war?"

Felix's reply is not immediate. "No."

"You're lying because you had to think about your answer, and ended up telling me 'no,'" Sylvain says, looking up at him, meaning to toss a teasing smile his way. But the smile is strained.

Felix's palms are defensively flat on the table. "Fine. Yes, I've thought of it some. After the war, I'm going to help rebuild our territory. Then I'm thinking of roaming Fódlan to go where my sword is needed."

Sylvain doesn't set his drink down so much as it stumbles from him and he struggles to right it. "What?"

"You can't be that surprised," Felix says, though he won't meet his eyes. "A noble's life – it's not for me. Especially not the politics. I'll do what the Fraldarius lands need me to do and take my leave. My father can keep his rule and pass it on to my uncle, instead."

"But–" Sylvain says and cuts himself off.

"But what?"

_But what about me? _How could they keep their promise if Felix went where Sylvain could not follow? The rebuilding of their lands was a given, but Sylvain had assumed they would accept their noble titles to change the whole of the continent for the better. Their wishes for a better Fódlan could be made real at their hands, but it would be a lifetime's work so future generations did not endure what they had; so they could teach today's children so that they might teach theirs and theirs in turn forevermore.

How could he tell him the truth of what he feels if he will not be anywhere close by to hear him?

"Anyway," Felix says, "it was just a thought. Things change." From the corner of his eye he looks at him, and there is worry tinged there. "What were you thinking you'd do?"

"I don't know," he easily lies, and sees Felix doesn't have the flower anymore. "I'd rather focus on what we're doing right now. Then I can worry about... after."

"Huh. You're thinking for once. Has the sun flickered out of existence?"

"Well, it_ is_ night," he says, smile less dishonest.

"You think you're funny, do you," Felix flatly says, unlike the tiny twinkle in his eye.

Sylvain laughs, accepting the jab to his ribs in good jest. War might roil, but sometimes fragments of normalcy can happen, too. 

* * *

And then sometimes those fragments are ripped from them with as much love as the withdrawal of a blade, a blade like the one Rodrigue sacrifices himself for instead of it taking the King's life.

It shatters the King. The King most eyes turn to, this boy clad in furs and rage and the bones of those who've died for him. Bones that have been replenished.

It is not Dimitri who Sylvain looks to or goes find. If it makes him disloyal, so be it. But why does no one else think of Felix, who has lost his father as he'd lost his brother, for the same man's sake? To many in Faerghus, to die for duty is to die for honor, but such pretty words are unkind to those left behind. Especially those like Felix.

He's at the edge of camp, a fire burning to light the night as he hacks swords and spits insults at a squire clearly wanting to be anywhere but there. The swords are real. The insults less so.

"Felix," Sylvain says, getting his attention and thus halting the downward arc of his sword, to the squire's relief. "Sorry for the interruption, but you"–he points to the squire, name unknown to him–"your lord called you over."

The squire scurries away.

Felix blows harsh air out of his nose. "He wasn't worth anything. With those so-called skills, he'll die on the field." He sheaths his sword, eyes on the horizon. "But isn't that what he wants? What they _all_ want? To bleed for an idea unquestioningly instilled in Faerghus that's worth nothing in the end?"

"Felix." His voice is quiet. Kind. Lost in a breeze weaving through the field. The earlier rain has dotted the grass; in the firelight, drops glisten in place of the stars the overcast skies obscure.

"What?" He still won't look at him.

"Do you want to talk?"

"What is there to say?"

With his foot, Sylvain flattens the grass before sitting down. "You tell me."

Briefly Felix considers him. He's done well to suppress the pain; it can hardly be seen through the anger.

Likely no one but Sylvain can recognize that look for what it is.

"You're wasting your time," Felix tells him, but he sits down anyway, knee bumping Sylvain's.

"No," he says, solemn. "Never when it's you."

The wood in the fire behind them cracks, and in that insignificant span of time Felix looks wide-eyed to him, then back to the front. It feels like it hadn't happened at all. He draws his legs in, resting his arms on top of his knees, and then his chin on his arms. "Is the boar still throwing a tantrum?"

"I'm not sure. I haven't seen him."

He scoffs. "If he learns nothing from this, he's too far gone." Another scoff, lighter. "All my father ever did was for the good of Faerghus. And for him, what was best for the Kingdom was what was best for that beast everyone calls a King. I wonder what the idiotic talk about living to avenge the dead will change to when he realizes this corpse is fully on him. A corpse who thought of him like a son." He draws his legs in closer, speaking muffled as he leans further onto his arms. "I can't agree with how my father died, or Glenn for that matter, but the least the so-called King could do is learn from their deaths. Them and all the others. And I don't mean the misplaced revenge he always rages about, but in completing what they gave their lives for in the first place. A Fódlan they would have wanted to live in." He pauses. Gives Sylvain the weakest glare he's ever seen on him. Weak and a little watery. "Damn you, you caring sop. You got me talking."

Sylvain's chest pangs, like he's been entirely hollowed out, and he doesn't know whether to pull in Felix for a hug or to kiss him or to blurt out three little words. None of them, because it would be unwise. All of them, because it is what he badly wants to do.

Instead, a very quiet remark. "It's okay to cry, you know."

"I'm not _crying."_

"Alright," Sylvain says, quieter. He won't argue with Felix. This is how the man is, refusing himself and the world until the weight of denial crushes him. But here Sylvain is to get him up when that happens. Even if it never does, here he will be.

He looks at Felix. He's put his forehead onto his arms. His shoulders are unsteady as they shake. As he is soundless, but incapable of hiding the truth.

Sylvain's eyes drift up. Beside him, slowly does Felix grieve; above him, slowly the clouds thin, and speckles of stars twinkle through. But. "Where is the moon?" he wonders aloud.

Felix clears his throat, but his voice retains some huskiness. "It's a new moon."

Peering closer, Sylvain sees that where the moon should be is a hole almost as black as what it has been dug unto. It seems to him he'd never considered the moon could be robbed of its light, the light it actually takes from the sun. "Oh."

"Why so morose?" Felix says, a hint of an old smile in the question. "It's not like the moon's gone. You just can't see it very well."

There is a slight pressure on Sylvain's arm and though by the dying campfire he sees that Felix has rested his head on his arm, he doesn't believe it.

"It'll come back as you know it," Felix says, eyes closed. "It always does."

In this night on a field witness to history as before and as they now create it, on grass and under the heavens that care not for anything but themselves, the whole of existence is condensed to just the two of them, and despite the mortal hubris that comes with it Sylvain knows this is how it should be. He rests his head atop Felix's, smiling. "It does." 

* * *

There are losses in this war. Just as there are gains. Rarely are the two balanced, but rarely is anything in life.

Rodrigue falls for them, as do countless nameless soldiers, faces none in high command had ever met or would ever meet. But Dedue is returned to them. Claude is persuaded to their cause, and he lends them help in their fight to take down the Empire.

And Dimitri.

For a Moon he'd essentially secluded himself, physically as well as within the terrible cage that had become his own head, adding the torment of Rodrigue's sacrifice to the mental chaos he constantly roiled in. He had thought deeply during that Moon, and in the end he'd broken free of himself. At the cost of Rodrigue's life, they had gained Dimitri.

All Felix had offered for the return of their childhood friend was the demand he'd fight for what was right – and the acknowledgment of his name. But it was Felix saying it. In that, he had given away more than he realized. Sylvain's smile had been small but true during that war council; Felix had noted it and kicked him under the table, which only widened the smile.

Faerghus unites under their King. The war's end nears, Sylvain thinks. And the scribes shall write them for the victors.

Enbarr is next. With that, perhaps the end. And thereafter–

He comes back to himself, to the rolling hills between these mountains in their advance to Fort Merceus. He sits straighter on his horse, trying to peek over the throng of men to see where Felix is. He cannot find him.

_Hmm__. _Later, he'll think of what follows. He has to live in the moment. First Merceus must fall.

Dimitri orders the cavalry in first. They smash through the fort's gates, allowing the Kingdom army to stream in, shouts erupting in both sides from those who clamor for glory.

Sylvain's voice does not rise with the others. His desire to win has never been barbaric. He is too aware of what victory in warfare means. But he fights because it is the only thing he can do to achieve what must be done.

He skewers his lance through men, sometimes as many as three at a time as they charge him, fools on foot, and though they had fought for the enemy he pities them, briefly, watching them come like crazed moths drawn to a flame – but this flame is sentient and unyielding and it is where they die.

He withdraws his lance, the men slumping down for the mutilated puppets they've become. Entrails drip like worms off the lance; with one quick, strong movement of his arm he flicks them off, and they squelch on the fort's flat stone tilework to be trampled by even those the fallen had called friends. He'd flicked too hard, and blood spatters to his eye. He sucks in air through his teeth, a gloved hand darting up to his blinded eye, squeezed shut, to wipe the blood away. His good eye surveys his surroundings for any surprise enemy charge.

It is not an enemy he sees but Felix, crossing swords with a fort soldier, unaware and unseeing the ax fly to him.

Sylvain is kicking his horse to action, frantically shouting for Felix to move, but he does not hear; nothing can be heard in this battle but the thrumming of one's own heart beating for what could be the last time.

He kicks the horse again, and he soars, graceful, floating for less than a second so Sylvain may intercept the ax's path – with his lance, with his body. It matters not as long as it is not Felix.

The ax buries itself through Sylvain's side, past the plate of his armor and to the softness of his flesh. Muscle parting like silk, air whistling through the gash – open on his armor, open on his skin – and he stumbles from his horse, crashing down in a way that knocks the ax from his body. His scream is nothing in this din. Faintly, he thinks he hears another scream, the usual indifference in that voice torn to rawness.

He and Felix sometimes spoke of prevailing in battle, of dying in peace some other day with the confident delusions of men too young to comprehend the finality of death.

_Where you go_, they'd often said,_ I will follow_. How laughably self-assured.

Death is not so kind when it stares plainly at Sylvain. It hurts, everywhere. Overwhelmingly. Transcending the mortality of his senses. His lungs hurt, the maimed one flapping wetly, dribbling blood out of the hole in his side and past his mouth. His fading remnants of consciousness hurt, stills of the life he'd led and the one he'd promised to lead flickering by. Things muddy: the sky, all he sees as he is crumpled on the ground, dyed red from the blood on his eye; the flashes of armed soldiers, mounted or otherwise, looming like giants above his supine form; the cries of the living and the dying, of men and beasts, of friend and foe.

_I didn't do enough_, he hazily thinks, with a distant twinge of panic, of regret. _It hurts_.

"_Sylvain_!"

That voice. It slices through the muddle like the sword that man wields, now violently hacking its way to him, blood spatter dark against the sickening pallor of his skin, the mad whites of his eyes. The sword rings as Felix tosses it – or perhaps it just falls from his hand as he too falls to his knees by Sylvain. Felix sits him up, hurriedly unbuckling his armor, alternating in screaming for a healer and for Sylvain, who is there but slipping away; he knows it with every tired blink erasing conspicuous seconds from this pathetically fleeting life of his. Two limpid trails below Felix's eyes have wiped away some of the blood smeared on his face. And, seeing him this close, Sylvain realizes there was no madness in those eyes. It's fear. It's tears.

"Don't cry," Sylvain says, or he thinks he says, but he doesn't feel his mouth move, doesn't hear anything come out of him except wheezes. "Don't follow."

Felix is incoherent. "Stop _talking_, how many times must I tell you this in your life– somebody's coming to give you back your life, Sylvain. Mercedes or– or _someone_; my magic is– why didn't I ever practice it? Why did you protect me? Where is a _healer_? I said– I _told_ you, yes _you_, to bring me a healer! I need a– Sylvain is–

Sylvain studies Felix's face, familiar from childhood to this death too soon, contorted to his own pain almost unrecognizably. They were fools, the both of them, to think they were invincible for the drunkenness of their youth.

_Don't you dare follow me into this_, he thinks, like Felix can hear him. _Our promise was reckless_. _You have to live. For me_.

What hurts, unspeakably so, is that Sylvain never told him the depth or truth of what he felt for him.

If he could laugh, he would. He's been injured many times, carrying the ghosts of wounds in his skin. This is beyond a healer. Magic is a blessing, but it is no miracle.

Sylvain wants to speak, a few last words to comfort Felix, to lie about how he was ready for this. Of how he loves him. When he opens his mouth, a sickening, thick wheeze is all he manages, blood pooling in the back of his throat.

A confession before his death – no, that was too selfish, too cruel; he'd leave Felix to fester on his lonesome on how those three words had pierced Sylvain. Better to die with it. Felix will mourn him and move on as he has before.

It _hurts_. That his life is bleeding out of him. That Felix will lose yet another someone. He thinks of Felix growing old alone, abandoned to life by those he cared for, and the pain is unbearable.

_I'm sorry__, Felix_, Sylvain thinks, and there are tears in his eyes from this unbearable pain, the flimsiness of mortality and love so continuously and absurdly ignored until they grip him by his collapsing lung. _I'm so, so sorry_.

He slips away and does not know it has come.

* * *

Astringency masking the grit of gore hits him first, as a smell and as a taste, disgusting and bright on his tongue like he's swallowed down a pulled tooth with a flask of alcohol. That he cannot see makes it worse; if he could see he could find sense in his senses. So he tries opening his eyes, just a sliver, and they crust open like soil baked and cracked under the summer sun.

There are rows of beds, starched white sheets soiled by the injured people who lie atop them. The infirmary, then. Though not a familiar one.

He raises his arm, finding it heavy as a log, to wipe at the grime in his eyes.

"Ah," says a kind voice. Mercedes, walking up to him, a bucket of fresh washcloths in her grip. Her smile is kinder yet. "You're finally up."

'Finally.' How did he get to the infirmary to begin with?

From his side, a pulse like his heart but dreadful and too deep answers him. There had been an ax there earlier. There had been blood and bone. Could have been this morning. But. 'Finally up.' Time had passed. Death, too.

"I thought," he rasps, "I was dead."

Her eyes soften. "Your condition was very grim. But we managed, especially in thanks to Felix finding you quickly."

_Felix_. His heart lurches. "Where...?" His voice does not let him finish.

"If you're asking where we are, it's Fort Merceus. We won and took it for our temporary camp. If you're asking where Felix is, I'm not sure, but he's uninjured." She gently places a washcloth on his forehead, the dampness of it soothing on his feverish skin. "He visited you often these three days you were unconscious." She laughs quietly. "I actually had to chase him away because he was being so demanding in our care for you. I've not really been able to leave the infirmary, but knowing him, he's been training."

Felix had been here. Watching over his soul's wavering. Fretting over him. Annoying the healers about it.

Sylvain laughs – only one short bark, because it hurts, and he winces, clutching his bandaged side. But his grin, if wobbly, persists.

"I'll get you something to drink," Mercedes says. "Don't even try to walk."

"Can Felix–"

"When you're more well-rested, Felix can visit again."

He's still smiling as she leaves.

After three days of nothing for nourishment but the power of magic, water tastes incredible, and he gulps it down greedily. He's not allowed food until later.

"Sleep and regain your strength," another pretty healer tells him.

Sylvain doesn't offer the slightest empty flirtation. He'll sleep well like it's his duty and see Felix as soon as he can.

Except rumors of Sylvain's recovery must have slipped out, as it's Felix who storms in to the infirmary hours later. He yells and insults him for his thoughtless self-sacrifice, and Sylvain takes it all with a small smile because Felix's exasperated panic is belied by the relief in his eyes. By murmuring about a hug Sylvain teases him for despite the thrashing of his heart.

Because Sylvain is no stranger to lies of his own. He brushes off the severity of the injury. He says this is what friends do. 'Friends;' it actually leaves his mouth like that after reminding Felix of the worth of his life, after amending what their childhood promise means.

But it smooths Felix's serrated edges. As he leaves, prodded away by a healer, he mumbles a red-faced thank you.

_That's something to wake up to_, Sylvain thinks, drifting peacefully to sleep.

The following morning, he is deemed well enough to leave, and with a single-minded purpose he searches for the fort's training grounds.

He is unfamiliar with this place, though, and gets himself lost. He's found himself at the end of a hall in front of a simple set of wooden doors opened just enough for Sylvain to glimpse movement beyond them. Thinking he might ask for help, he opens the doors, and the sunlight falls in fragmented rainbows through stained glass on what is a chapel. Modest busts of the Goddess and the Saints are at the altar, and a figure standing before them now turns.

"Were you praying?" Sylvain says, closing the doors behind him, his surprise matched by Felix's.

Felix crosses his arms, staring at the dusty floor. "I've been trying to, but nothing has come to mind."

Neither of them had ever been very devout, turning to the divine only when the will of men could do no more. Felix's fear must have been a monster of its own for him to be here.

"Hold on," Sylvain says, mentally repeating Felix's words, "you've 'been trying'? Were you here before?"

Felix does not answer, but he doesn't need to. Sylvain sees how the dust is disturbed by only two sets of footprints: his recent own and Felix's, which trace the floor in aimless pacing that could not have been done in a single day.

"Felix," Sylvain says, as quiet as a thought, and he walks closer to him.

But he stops when Felix speaks in a voice unlike him. "These last few days, I didn't know what to do," he says, helpless as Sylvain has ever heard him. His arms around himself slacken; he dips his head forward like it has withered. In the falsely joyous colored light, the sleepless crescents under his eyes are suffused in purple. "I wield my sword for myself and for those who cannot protect themselves. But what good is it when_ I _can't protect myself?" He picks his head up. "What would I have left if you leave me?"

Sylvain has no reply to that. He thinks of how Felix had paled at the sight of him breaking their promise so flagrantly and he couldn't say Felix would be at peace with his death in the battlefield. How could he have expected it so? If the ax had slain Felix as had been intended, Sylvain would have never been whole again.

Felix raises an arm, and briefly Sylvain thinks he's going to slap him for his hypocrisy. What the arm does is wind around his back, joined by the other arm, in that hug Felix had suggested yesterday. Then it's Felix's face burying into his chest, his body still as the stone surrounding them, but with none of their cold. Sylvain immediately returns the embrace, reveling in Felix's warmth, this proof he lives; and that Sylvain can feel it is proof _he_ lives.

He pulls him in as close as they can be, and even that still leaves too much between them. In distance. In things unsaid. He presses his cheek to Felix's hair, closing his eyes. Remembers a day years back, similar stone around them, but nowhere holy like this. Quite the opposite. Sylvain's room with all the secrets it had witnessed, some more severe than others. That room was in dusty ruins now; what had happened there was lost under rubble. But Sylvain had taken that day with him because memories lingered better in bone. And etched deeper into him than all else is the face currently buried in his chest.

Gently, he pulls away from the embrace. But he maintains closeness to cradle Felix's face, meeting his eyes. "I'm not going to leave you," he vows, and the light dripping over the busts unloved by the Empire intensifies. Can he show him he loves him without saying so? Can Felix read the history they've written for themselves and know it for unshakable truth?

"Do you remember," Felix says, five heartbeats later; five precisely that Sylvain had counted boom in this sacrosanct silence, "years ago, when you and I..." Pink dapples his cheeks from the stained glass, from his own body betraying him.

_Every day and every night_, he thinks, with a skip to his breathing because Felix remembers, too. "Yes. What about it?"

"You said there might be a 'next time.' If I ever needed it."

Sylvain is not breathing at all.

Felix tugs him down, lips to his ear. "Remind me that we're alive."

The path to Felix's quarters is almost drunken in how Sylvain wobbles, giddy, hand hot around Felix's wrist, so unlike the last time they'd been in this situation. Felix follows, natural as the course of a river, and after the creak of the opening door, slips in without being told or pulled – he is there, simply, flat to the door and flat to Sylvain, hungrily beginning what a chapel could not have possibly contained.

They are not in their battle attire; this clothing is thinner, looser, almost like nothing is there at all. And then there isn't when Sylvain slides the linen shirt off Felix, the tidy and tight style of his hair mussing. Felix slips his hands beneath Sylvain's shirt, rippling it off in one smooth motion. All this while their lips meet, again and again, heads tilted slightly right now left now center in every possible way two people can kiss.

Sylvain's hands flit to Felix's face, holding it for the beauty it is, every year he has yearned for it bright as summer at his fingertips; he undoes Felix's hair, thumbs his cheek and jaw, committing him to touch as fervently as he has by sight. Felix holds on to him by the waist, his fingers firm but for where the pale tissue of a new scar runs jagged along Sylvain's side. There, they are gentle as moonlight, tracing the scar like it is scripture to be memorized.

Push and pull. Push where they fit into each other or make themselves fit. Pull so they may steal air to push again. Pull, where Felix breathes a repeated_ I'm sorry_ with his fingers fluttering over the scar. Push, where Sylvain's teeth click against Felix's from the passion of this kiss as he tells Felix, to those very lips, that he never again wants to hear him apologize for this. Push again, physical, with Sylvain on top of Felix on this bed belonging to a stranger until recently, an enemy at that. Now they claim it for themselves; they will leave their mark upon it. Pull where Sylvain tugs at Felix's pants while keeping one hand always to his face, his mouth always to his skin, traveling down from Felix's parted lips spilling everything in their sweet nothings to his neck to his chest to his hips, slowly exposed as he removes his clothes. There he pauses, admiring Felix under him, how his body differs from Sylvain's – the width of his chest tapers in his waist, his muscles lean as a dancer's, the tiny nicks of old healed scars scattered like the stars.

"You're beautiful," he says. As he's said before. As he means more than ever.

Felix yanks him up to him, his fingers having made a nest of Sylvain's hair. Sylvain thinks a reprimand is coming, something about him just saying things. Instead: "Shut up and kiss me."

Straddling him, he obliges, this message from a divine being far closer to him than wherever the Goddess and her Saints stay in the heavens. And it pleases this mortal deity. It is in what he murmurs in turns quiet as night or loud as day; it is in his body arching to Sylvain's, straining in between his legs.

The pressure is too much to be restrained by clothing, and Sylvain drifts a hand down Felix's body to get all his clothes off for good.

"Ah, Felix?" comes a voice muffled through the door, and they both stiffen. Then a _boom-crackle_ of wood splintering, a fist-sized chunk breaking off the door, outside light streaming through. "Oh, no..." The voice clears: Dimitri's. "I'm sorry. I did not mean to do that. This is Dimitri, by the way."

Sylvain regains his awareness of his body, and he dips his head to Felix's collarbone to smother a laugh there.

"What is it?" Felix says, sounding annoyed remarkably soon given what they were just doing. He halfheartedly swats the back of Sylvain's head.

"I wanted to let you know I was told Sylvain is well now."

Sylvain has to bite his own knuckles to keep that laugh in place.

"Yes," Felix says, and peeking up at him Sylvain sees how his mouth is twitching from concealing a laugh of his own, "I know."

"He was no longer in the infirmary – I went myself to see him – but the healers said he'd taken to a walk around the fort. You might see him around, then, but he is now in a condition to do so; you need not worry anymore."

"Fine. Great. Thanks."

"Very well. I'll, um, leave now. Apologies if I have disturbed you."

Sylvain is shaking; Felix has to grip him by the shoulder blades.

"I will send someone to fix the door," Dimitri says. "I apologize for that, too. My strength–"

"Alright, thanks, got it; you can go," Felix says, curter than necessary, but from the fading thump of feet, Dimitri does leave.

Now Sylvain allows himself that laugh, flopping on his back beside Felix. He can barely breathe from how deep within his belly that laugh rises; tears form in his eyes, the room blurring. Felix swats at him again, but he's laughing too. It is a quieter kind, but Sylvain hears it, and how he loves its sound.

"Why would he come do that?" Sylvain asks when he can speak, wiping the tears from his eyes.

"He's been awkwardly nice to me since he got back to his senses."

"'Awkwardly nice,' huh? Good to know Dimitri really is back."

"Don't you _ever_ tell him you were here," Felix warns, the threat in it nullified by his laugh.

"Why would I?"

"I don't know. To brag."

Sylvain is calm, but a mild unease has appeared in the back of his mind. "Brag about... bedding you?" He glances at their disarrayed clothes, the wrinkled bed. _Well, almost bedding you_. "Why would I?"

"I don't know," Felix says again, unsure of himself.

"What does my horse have to do with anything?" he teases, needing this conversation to go to a better place.

Fortunately, it has the intended effect; Felix groans and elbows him before reaching for his shirt, pulling it on. "You fix yourself too," he tells Sylvain as the shirt flattens his disheveled hair to his face. He tosses Sylvain's shirt to him. "If you're here when whoever he sends shows up..."

Sylvain holds the shirt loosely between his hands, the fabric creasing. "Would that be so bad?" he says, swiftly ruining what he had just achieved. He dares not look at Felix; he puts on the shirt and hears the spluttered reply.

"_Obviously_ that would be bad!"

His shirt is on. Felix has pulled his hair up – not quite the sweep he's been fond of, but a short imitation of the bun he'd once worn.

"Why would it be bad?" he asks. They're here already; why not push all the way?

"Because," Felix says, like the word is reason alone.

It is, in a way. Sylvain sorts through a medley of reasons, each stronger than the last: because they're heirs to noble houses expected to continue their bloodline; because they're at war; because Felix does not want to be demeaned to Sylvain's plaything. Because this isn't real. Because Sylvain has not said _I love you_.

It bursts from him just as fire crackles from the tossing of tinder.

"I l–" he says, and bites his own tongue as he realizes Felix would never believe such triteness spoken now. He'd think Sylvain was mocking him. He lets out an unsteady breath. "I'll go," he says, and does.

But he also thinks.

He needs to be honest with Felix. This isn't something he can keep secret anymore. Before their next battle, he has to tell him; he will never again brush shoulders with Death with this unsaid. He does not allow himself to dwell on Felix's reaction at his confession, or of how it will change them when this thing that had been buried between them without Felix's knowledge is revealed. To dwell on how it will go wrong will detract him from saying it, and he has to – absolutely has to – free it from himself. He can accept whatever the consequences are, but he cannot lie to himself or to Felix anymore.

_Tomorrow_, he decides. After today isn't so hot on their skin where they'd touched, and when whatever Sylvain says Felix will not perceive as heat of the moment but heartfelt truth. 

* * *

The drums of the war council's zealous speeches before their march to Enbarr thrum in counter to Sylvain's heart. Together, they amount to too much noise in his head. But he means to diminish it.

"Felix," he says, walking up to him, a hand flitting to his elbow that he immediately retracts. "Can you come with me outside for a moment?"

"What is it?"

"It's almost sunset. Let's watch it."

"Why? Have you forgotten how it looks like? I'll describe it for you: the sun goes down and night comes in."

He could easily go for a whinging and annoy Felix into accompanying him. But it isn't how it should be. He looks solemnly at him. "Please."

Felix is temporarily stupefied by his earnestness. "I guess it's fine," he mumbles to the floor.

Sylvain smiles, despite the increasing swarm of butterflies in his chest. "Let's go."

He doesn't yet have the fort's design learned, and he doesn't really know where he is going, but a way out to the parapet must be somewhere. He takes them to staircase after staircase, winding up dizzyingly, Felix's footsteps echoing his. In silence they go, Felix simply accepting what it is Sylvain is doing, and the butterflies flit in circles ever-growing.

An exit in the shape of a doorless gap of stone, the late sun bathing the wall beyond it in melting gold. It beckons, and Sylvain heeds it, Felix behind him. Sylvain rests his arms on the wall's embrasure. The opening is wide enough to let Felix stand to his side, but not so wide Felix couldn't elbow him if he wanted. Though he keeps his hands to himself, protectively clutching his elbows, squinting at the descending sun.

Sylvain briefly squeezes his own arm, willing himself to do this, though he does not now how to start. "I don't think I've taken the time to really look at a sunset in the Empire," he says, hoping a natural conversation eases the way to a different sort.

"I can't imagine this will be much different than any other sunset you've seen."

Sylvain smiles. "I guess I'm a romantic."

Felix side-eyes him. "A philanderer, more like."

Already this is not going smoothly. Yet it's close to what Sylvain needs to crumble. "I won't deny the way I've treated women, but I _am_ a romantic."

"You make it sound like you've been in love," Felix says, scoffing. He faces the sunset, though he keeps his eyes not where the sun sinks into the horizon, but the cool of the incoming night. Enough sunlight remains to fall over his profile, gold deeper than the crown they bleed for. It weaves into his hair, the blue-black of a crow's plumage.

Years ago, Sylvain had called him beautiful. Yesterday he'd done the same.

He would do the same now.

"I am in love," he says, and it gets Felix's eyes back on him, wide as the moon and far prettier.

"You– but there's no one by you. I would have known her by now. Did you let her get away?"

Sylvain runs his tongue behind his lower lip, considering the setting sun. It burns him, and he now considers the full moon itself, high up in the heavens where night first glided in. Felix's eyes really are prettier than it. "Briefly," he says, the sight of it calming him, white against the blue of dreams, "because of the war."

"...you were reunited?"

"Yes." He turns to him, and he is utterly, completely grounded. "And I'm not ever letting him go."

Felix's dismay falters, confusion etched on his brow. "'Him'?"

Sylvain looks and looks at him.

And Felix returns that look with a lost one of his own until he isn't, until his eyes go rounder yet, until his mouth parts and he questioningly moves his hand toward his chest in a weak gesture.

Sylvain nods.

"But," Felix says, in the last of his disbelief, ears tinging pink, "the women."

"I was never in love with any of them. You could have found feelings more genuine in an opera."

"You loved none of them, though they were many?"

"They were distractions, really." He pauses, looking at no stone on the parapet in particular. "Especially after you and I first kissed. Kind of funny in retrospect," he says, laughing curtly, "that I kept bothering you because I was trying to get someone in bed with you, when I think it was my justification to get me with you." He runs a hand through his hair. "I'm still not sure when exactly I fell for you, but it was our first time together that made me realize I already loved you because I couldn't stop thinking about it–"

Felix throws his arms around Sylvain with such force it knocks the breath from him. He staggers – Felix too, but he is safe inside Sylvain's arms, wrapped back around him without thinking.

"I," Felix says, muffled against Sylvain's chest, "cannot _fucking_ believe you."

Sylvain blinks down at him. At what is happening. "Do, um, you mean that literally? Because I'm being sincere."

"I know," is the soft reply. "I've known you for years. This is you as _you_."

"So my reward for baring my feelings to you is a hug? No complaints, but can I get your rejection already so my heart quits trying to break out of my rib cage?"

He feels Felix shift his head to the side. He pulls back, and it's not just his ears that are pink anymore.

"The Goddess have mercy on me," Felix mutters, which Sylvain is about to comment is an amusingly odd thing for someone agnostic as him to say, but he cannot say it when Felix has fiercely tugged him to his level to kiss him.

All those times Felix had glared daggers at the girl of the day. His refusal of Sylvain's help to find a girl for himself. His jealousy at his attempts to comfort Dimitri. The color on his face at any compliments or tactile proximity. Screaming like hell itself had come when Sylvain almost died; staying stubbornly at his side to see that he lived. That he had let someone unravel him, and it had been Sylvain – then as yesterday, in a promise he'd held on to.

The Goddess have mercy on _him_.

He cradles Felix's back, pressing him as close as their attire will allow. It's not enough; Sylvain would tear Felix's clothes off if he could. But they are out here, up above, the wind whipping, the moon peeking as the night embraces the heavens. He deepens the kiss, uncaring for how their noses squish together, savoring the hunger in Felix's mouth contrasted by the weakness whined from it. This posture is a bit uncomfortable, having to bend his head down to reach Felix's lips. But he could get used to it. He'd be more than happy to.

He's starting to run out of air, thinner at this height, thinner yet with Felix busy at his lips. Felix is, too; his shallow inhales and exhales tickle Sylvain. He doesn't want to cast his head aside to breathe, but if he doesn't, one of them will pass out. As he does, Felix, desperate to continue, unintentionally kisses his cheek.

Sylvain smiles, so true it hurts. "Sorry. Needed to breathe."

Felix opens his eyes. A smile spreads on him as well: wonderful, real. Sylvain's.

It _hurts_.

"I suppose that if I'm to be thankful for all the people you've kissed before me," Felix says, weaving his fingers through Sylvain's hair, "it's that you got good enough at it I wouldn't want to stop when it was finally my turn."

"How long did I keep you waiting?"

"_Years_."

Sylvain winces. "When you'd insult my intellect, I thought you were being mean. Turns out you were right."

"At least we're here now."

Sylvain brings their foreheads together, humming.

"And you're not ever letting me go, are you?"

"Never. How else can I keep our childhood promise if I'm not with you every day of our lives?" He presses a kiss to Felix's forehead. "You know, it always did sound a bit like a marriage proposal."

Felix colors. "You've only just told me you love me and you're already talking like this?"

"I was just saying!"

"If anything, this makes you more of a fool for not realizing it sooner. I was obviously aware of what the promise sounded like. I wouldn't have made it otherwise."

"Yes, alright; you have the rest of our lives to reprimand me for being dumb."

"I'm going to take you up on that," Felix says, smile small, the red still on his face. He glances toward the sunset, the last of the sun's radiance shrinking dutifully at the arrival of the night. "There's something else I had in mind."

"Hmm?"

"You should–" He pauses, clearing his throat. "You should take me to your quarters."

They hadn't finished what they'd started yesterday, had they?

Sylvain carefully extricates himself from Felix and then takes his hand, pulling him in with a grin that gets Felix redder. "I should," he agrees.

He leads them away. At their backs, the sun has gone to sleep. The moon has risen. 

* * *

Enbarr's canals run red. The blood refuses to dilute; there is too much of it, added generously by the number of soldiers' corpses – from both sides – at their banks, if they have not bonelessly dropped in. Gore and destruction do not belong in such a beautiful place, staining the steps of the famous opera house, splattered in a bereft market square. But it is what Edelgard has cultivated at her own hand, and so it is what they the rebels return to her.

Mercifully, the civilians keep to their homes, avoiding the windows. The only witnesses to the carnage are those who no longer blink at the sight of a man's head severed to chunks. Dimitri had ordered the army to minimize damage to the city and to attack only soldiers who did not surrender. They are as ardent to the Empire as Dimitri's soldiers are to Faerghus, however, and barely any choose life over death.

Sylvain strikes down a soldier not much older than he. He'd been a civilian once, this stranger. He could have been someone they saved. But he'd chosen to fight; he'd chosen to die. To truly achieve peace in Fódlan, they will need to address the wrongs even the Adrestians have suffered. It will not be easy, but that is why the King has his friends by his side.

The war's end is palpable, a buzz in the air that invigorates their troops. That they are aided by allies they have swayed to their cause, their numbers far larger than how they had begun the war, adds to their valiance.

And personally, for Sylvain, that afterward he can resume life with Felix leaves his lance a blur, his senses heightened to their fullest.

The efficacy of their organized attack soon leaves the city in their hands. Their losses have been few, and the great very many of those who had come now rally to a market square, celebrating raucously – all that remains for them to do is to take the palace and Edelgard's life, and these, in this victorious intoxication, are assured. Dimitri makes his way to the front, people reverently stepping aside for him. Dedue is behind him, and a few feet behind he sees the trail of his old peers, Dimitri's most closest advisers in this war flanking him as Dimitri stands on a dais, preparing for a victory speech. Felix is walking up too, but he turns his head back and finds Sylvain's eyes in the middle of everything. He tips his head to the dais, smiling.

Grinning, Sylvain dismounts and follows.

Dimitri has already begun to address the people, who have fallen silent at the rouse of their King, and mesmerized by him not many notice Sylvain's late arrival.

Felix, of course, does. He nudges him with his foot as Sylvain takes a place next to him. "Took you long enough."

"I was just thinking how regal you looked up here. You'll be an imposing Duke."

He'd meant it as a tease to get Felix blushing, but Felix's reaction is stern. A bit hurt. "Now's not the time," he mumbles.

They'd once discussed their post-war plans over drinks, Sylvain remembers, and Felix didn't want to be the next Duke Fraldarius.

There are things to discuss afterward.

Sylvain's expression turns serious. "Later?" he says.

Felix nods.

Dimitri triumphantly finishes his speech and raises a fist that the crowd follows him in, a holler of many people for one more victory rumbling in the square.

"First," Felix says lowly by his ear, little finger reaching for Sylvain's, "we win."

"And we will."

Their fingers bind them as much as their words.

* * *

Dimitri and the Professor exit the throne room. Immediately, the army rejoices, cheers and shouts deafening; people toss aside their weapons to embrace, or they hoist them to reach for the sky where their arms could not suffice.

Sylvain does not join the celebration because he is frantically searching for Felix, the crowd's united voice humming wildly in his head: _It's over__!__ It's over__!_

In the massive crowd he has to find spaces to navigate in quickly, before they are gone, while sweeping these many faces for Felix's. The rush makes his heart beat faster, as does the promise of–

Beyond, at the other side of the crowd, a line of emptiness running a crooked path to that end, standing there as time stops – the soldiers' laughs and silent grins, drinks spilling floating droplets, the sunlight like a still sheet of silk – standing there is Felix, eyes finding Sylvain's at the same time. And now he hurries to Sylvain as Sylvain hurries to him, with time returning when they collide in each other.

"It's over," Sylvain murmurs to Felix's neck, and through the blood and sweat he smells Felix himself, he's alive, they both are, it's _over_. He pulls back, beaming. "But we're just beginning."

"Sap," Felix mutters past a smile that would weaken the Goddess herself, and then they're kissing, swept up by the thrill in the air, uncaring if anyone watches.

But someone had – when things calm and they walk around the palace for someplace to sleep, knowing glances and suggestive eyebrow waggles are cast their way. Sylvain tries to take it in stride, but the heat in his ears is strong. Though not quite as strong as Felix's, who covers a hand with his face while the other is twined in Sylvain's.

They're too tired for anything other than lying down next to each other, handhold unbroken. With his other hand Sylvain thumbs Felix's cheek, the repetitive motion soothing to them both as both their blinking slows, their breathing deep and synchronized. His mind is starting to wander to the hazy realm halfway between consciousness and dreams, and without thinking at all, he quietly asks, "Do you think stories will be written about us?"

"By 'us,'" Felix mumbles back, "do you mean you and I, or the army?"

"I don't know."

"What about the horse?"

He smiles, sleepy. "I knew you liked the name."

Felix hums. "I'm sure there are plays being written as we speak about our war effort. But you and I haven't done much yet."

"So you think there _could_ be stories about us."

"We're not really lacking in typical opera material, are we?"

"When that opera happens, I'm taking you to see it." Sylvain pauses, fully aware of his simper. "I hope whoever plays us is attractive."

"Of course you'd say that," Felix says, not even bothering to open his eyes.

His smile softens.

"Sylvain."

"Hmm?"

Felix burrows onto the pillow, eyes drawn tighter. "I love you."

Felix's hand on his is the only thing tethering him to the ground. "I love you too, Felix."

They do not let go of each other for the rest of the night. 

* * *

They can go home, Dimitri tells them. Home being Faerghus, cold and unforgiving; to where they were raised and will in turn raise back from the injuries the war has inflicted upon it. As they had parted five and a half years ago for their own territories, they will part again.

This trek is longer. To go from Enbarr to where the old Faerghus border began they must traverse the continent. None of them complain. It means more time together before this next chapter of their lives. Sylvain's people travel behind Felix's out of convenience for the proximity of their territories, but if they hadn't, Sylvain would have ran his horse up to Felix's regardless – not just to be by him, but to talk of their united _next_.

"You're going to take over from your uncle, right?" Sylvain asks him, placidly.

"Yes." He shifts on his horse somewhat uncomfortably.

"I remember you told me being a Duke wasn't what you wanted to do. Is that still...?"

"It's still not what I think I'm meant to do." Felix sighs. "But for my father's sake, I'll complete what he couldn't finish. And I'll do my own part in making a Fódlan I don't completely hate. Like you."

"I hadn't told you what I planned on doing as the next Margrave," he teases, but his smile doesn't come to his eyes.

Felix glances at him sidelong. There is no judgment there. Simply somber understanding. "You didn't need to. It was obvious."

"How so?"

"Someone with your past and obnoxiously large heart isn't going to let Fódlan be as it was." He faces forward. "What is it you want to do to change it?"

Sylvain's mouth turns up, fondness mingled with melancholy. "A lot. I want to better relations with the Sreng. I want to change how the nobility is structured; it's corrupt and obsessed with Crests, so I want to change how people see Crests. Phase them out of importance, you know?" He opens and closes his fist, the metal gauntlet adjusting to his joints' movement. "I was already born to this. The least I can do is use this power to make things better."

"Sounds like a lifetime commitment," Felix replies a moment after.

A life Felix does not want.

"It will be," Sylvain admits, the melancholy making his heart sink. This is something he will not give up on. But neither will he let Felix go. There has to be a compromise.

"I've never had aspirations as lofty as that," Felix says. "But I've also never been the Duke. Things change," he says, in echo of the last time they'd had such a conversation, and gives Sylvain a small smile.

"But we won't?" Sylvain asks, to get it in words.

His smile is just a bit bigger. "But we won't."

Sylvain's own smile is more real. "In the mean time, we can visit each other," he says not even a breath after he thinks it. The possibility of it takes shape in his mind: hard work in rebuilding their Kingdom, well-deserved days of leisure with Felix. It is so possible he could reach out and touch it. And then he sees something else, much less possible but as exciting. He perks up. "Do you think we could get a castle built between our respective ones? Like, halfway through our lands, so we could rule in the same place and not have to travel to see each other? We'd even advise each other. Two are better than one."

Felix huffs a quiet laugh. "That sounds like you want to join our lands."

Joining their lands. Written creeds could do that, with the King's seal affirming what both parties debated to a mutual agreement. That, too, would take time.

But. There is another way.

"Felix," he says, "will you marry me?"

"I will," is the immediate reply.

Sylvain stumbles on his stirrups, jaw dropping. "You agreed so readily!"

Felix glances at him. He's slightly pink. "Are you not asking in earnest?"

"No, I am! But I thought you'd blush more. Or splutter. Or chide me for asking too soon into our relationship. I did _not_ think I'd have an answer right away."

"I've fallen for you over the years," Felix says, fully looking at him. "I told you, I know what our promise sounded like. It seemed you were approaching that subject, anyway. I'm not very surprised." He fiddles with his tuft of hair. "I... am happy you asked."

Sylvain is ahorse, but he's soaring. "Can we stop for a moment? I want to kiss you. Asking you to marry me and getting my answer while we're both on our own horses isn't romantic."

"It'll halt the line," Felix says, but Sylvain has already climbed off and grabbed Felix's mount's reins, slowing it down. Felix's scowl at him is so pitiably docile that Sylvain laughs. "Sylvain, this could have waited!"

"No," he says, reaching for Felix's waist, sliding him off with ease as Felix lets himself be swept off, "it couldn't have."

He kisses him now as he was long meant to, their arms around each other stronger than steel, the fire long smoldering in Sylvain glowing over Felix. The distant moon hauled to his fingertips, alight by him, finally by him.

The line's confused murmurs at their stopping turn to whistles and cheers. Sylvain smiles against Felix's mouth before pulling back, hand to Felix's cheek.

"I'm announcing our marriage," he says, and Felix's quiet happiness flushes impressively.

"_Sylvain_," he says, a warning in his own name like countless other times. And like those countless other times, it serves only to lift Sylvain's spirits.

"Soldiers of Faerghus!" Sylvain shouts, standing on the tips of his toes to grant him even more height. He wraps an arm around Felix's waist, drawing him to his side. "Let it be known that Felix Hugo Fraldarius"–he gestures grandly to him–"has just promised himself to me, Sylvain Jose Gautier, until death do us part!"

The soldiers' cheers are raucous; weapons are butted to the earth, clanged to shields, waved in the air.

Felix smacks him on the chest. "That wasn't necessary! We're not even married yet."

"Of course it was necessary! How else will everyone know that I love you and you love me?" He takes Felix's hand in both of his. "I won't continue the nobles' obsession of Crests, demeaning myself to cattle that passes down power for the sake of keeping it. I will not make anyone else go through what I have. We will not be promised to others by the wills of our fathers; no one ever deserved that, and no one will experience that in the world I want to make. _We_ will choose what we want. And Felix, I choose to be with you. I want everyone to know I have _chosen_ to be with you." Bringing Felix's hands to his lips, he graces them with a kiss in favor of a ring. He looks up, certain Felix is pinker.

He is. "You're embarrassing me. You read too much romance," he says, but he's having trouble fighting off a smile.

Sylvain laughs, hoisting Felix back to his horse. "You have the rest of your life to get used to it."

"I do," Felix replies, the smile winning.

"See," Sylvain says, mounting his own horse. "You're already sounding like we're marrying."

"You're incorrigible."

He tilts his head to him, feeling his grin reach the sun itself, rivaling it in brightness, even. "You're smiling."

Felix rolls his eyes, though the smile remains. "There's an issue, though. The construction of a new castle isn't feasible. Funds are low from the war, and what we have will go to repairing the Kingdom."

Sylvain chuckles. "So practical."

"It's reality." He twists his mouth aside. "As is the fact we'll need heirs."

Sylvain exchanges his smile for a serious expression. "I mean it when I say I have no intention of passing my Crest on, but I will find someone – blood be damned – to head my house after I can't anymore. In the meantime, I want to live as I want. Don't you feel the same?"

"Yes," Felix says, the tension easing on his shoulders.

"For me," Sylvain says, smile returned, "living means being by your side. I can't be there every day because of our duties. But I will be yours. I will see you if I must wait days in between because I won't let you go again." It's precarious to offer Felix his hand as they ride. He does it anyway. "Will you wait for me?"

"You already know the answer," Felix says, grasping his hand, fitting his fingers in between Sylvain's.

He squeezes Felix's hand. "I guess I do, huh?"

"No thanks to you taking literal years to realize how you felt about me, and me having to put up with it."

"You're going to win any argument we ever have with this to hold over me, aren't you?"

Felix hums, mouth turned sweetly up, and he withdraws his hand.

Sylvain laughs. It's not that it was funny, not really. It's just happiness lighting its way out of him. He's here, alive, at the end of a war making promises to leave the world kinder and to make _his_ world Felix. Together they have made it to see another day. Together they will see many more.

The sun is the same as he knows it shining on the sky, leading their way home. 

* * *

Sylvain did not sleep.

He'd witnessed the night darken and deepen and settle as if it had always draped itself across his land. Nothing outside the castle grounds was distinguishable in such blackness, nothing except the very things that made the night what it was: the pinpricks of stars, the eye of the moon. Heralds and saviors of the night, feeble as their light was. Feeble and beautiful.

And he had seen the night pushed back by the first tender rays of the sun, a pale line in the horizon overwhelmed by black that it chased and was slowly victorious over, soft pink and orange taming midnight's rich blue. Victorious and glorious. A new day. A day this land had seen before, but not what it brings today.

Despite his sleeplessness, not a trace of tiredness wore him down, and he'd sprung up at that tinge of morning. He'd had no breakfast after changing into something handsome and proper; he'd had no thoughts in mind as he ran out to the early-spring northern Faerghus morning, breath puffing out in clouds full as the ones in the heavens.

But he very much has a thought as he now turns his head to the moon, persistent in the face of the sun. _Felix is coming_.

It won't be for hours yet; no fool rode this early. Wherever they'd camped, they'd be setting off about now with the sunlight to guide them to the Gautier stronghold. The fool here is him for standing guard out when he has naught to do but wait.

The actual guards voice their concerns politely, but Sylvain laughs them off, as he does the servants who even more politely suggest he waits inside the castle's warmth.

"I like it better out here," he says, looking at how the whole of the sky has been painted by the early sun.

They tell him it is cold, but he knows nothing of it; there is too much warmth in him, and he paces about to wear it away, but it only increases. His furred cape whips as he tosses it off. It's not much better.

"Is that... a rider?" one of the guards asks.

In the very horizon where the sun had risen from is a figure, growing in size as it nears: a horse, and a person who pushes it forward. There is no party behind them, and it cannot be Felix and his people, Sylvain realizes with a heavy drop in his stomach despite the firmness of his feet.

"Wait," he mumbles after feeling that unsteadiness.

With the sun to the rider's back, the shadows that dance upon them hide their identity. But Sylvain sees hair grown long as he'd pleaded, two swords as he's long known them, the wink of a steel ring hanging off a leather neck cord as gold didn't suit them.

Sylvain runs for the stables, jumping bareback on the first stallion he sees, kicking him off to a run to the guards' worried cries.

With a brilliant grin, Sylvain turns his head over his shoulder, and breathing in deep the bite of the air, he shouts, elated, "That's my husband!"

His horse beats down half-frozen earth as Sylvain urges him on, all his weight leaned forward to lessen the load on the animal's back, to get him to that other horse running to him the sooner.

They – he on his horse, Felix on his own – come to an abrupt stop just feet from each other. The horses puff and whinny from the effort; Sylvain's own heart is as wild as if he'd run this distance himself, but he won't let it show.

Neither does Felix, his composure perfect. "You won't believe the stupidity I've had to listen to," is the first thing he says, voice level, when their horses have quieted.

"Same here," Sylvain replies, calm as he can make himself from this ride, from his heart beating with tremendous force everywhere in him. "Being in charge is annoying."

"It can't be more stupid than what I've heard. I challenged a few complainers to duels to shut them up if I won." His smirk could be a blade of its own. "You can guess how those ended."

"What a coincidence," he airily says, with an airier smile. "Same here."

They look at each other. They dismount, Sylvain a tad faster, and his arms are already open for Felix, who falls in between them, his arms tight around Sylvain. Felix's face is cold from exposure, but with every moment they linger in each other's arms, insistent mouth-to-mouth, he takes the warmth from Sylvain to make it his own. It has been half a year since last they'd met, and every lonely minute of every hour of every day that had separated them melts to nothing from the intensity of their reunion.

So impassioned is it that Sylvain has to pull back to keep them from fully burning. The air in the little nook between them still is hot and marked by their heavy breathing. That the day is cold is but a memory.

"I missed you," Sylvain says when he feels he can speak. "I missed you so much. Every time we part, I live to meet you again."

"Did you read that in one of your awful romance books?" Felix says, but he can't even bother to hide the upturn to his lip.

"Nope. That came directly from my heart."

"Ugh."

"You say that, but you missed me too."

"I did," he admits, retracting a hand from around Sylvain's neck to tug uselessly at his hood.

"Why did you sneak from camp?" Sylvain asks, smiling back, tracing the sharpness of Felix's cheekbone. "Your men are going to be worried."

"I'm sure they're chasing after me now. But they'll live; lords have done worse than ride earlier than everyone without telling them." He stands on the tips of his toes, pressing a kiss to Sylvain's forehead. "I wanted to see the sunrise with you."

Sylvain laughs. "You were a little late for that, but it's the thought that counts! I knew you had some sentimentality in the depths of your heart."

"I don't mind them up here. They're clearer than down south."

Sylvain hums, unconvinced by Felix's indifference. He draws him to his side, Felix completely allowing it, nestling his head against Sylvain. They watch the morning bless the heavens, the last of the night disappeared – save the moon, a pale crescent paling yet, accompanying the ever-rising sun, their light flashing on their steel rings.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ok so i altered the paired ending a bit. but i made it gayer!!! nintendo hire me to write what the ppl want


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